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The modern formatting addiction in writing

3mon 7d ago by lemmy.world/u/dynomight in dynomight from dynomight.net

People write with headers and bullets when they don't have any content. It looks like a PowerPoint slide, not for brevity, but to hide that they didn't do any work. They aren't summarizing, the bullet points are the work.

Yep, it's the same impulse that made people turn the font size up to 16 and increase the margins as much as allowable and triple-space their essays in high school. It's to make it look like you have something when you don't. Teachers weren't fooled, but maybe the average reader will give them the benefit of the doubt and imagine there's a good essay there

Good reminder that I need to clear out a bunch of excessive formatting for the next blogpost I am writing.

I am a massive headings and bullet point use in AI defender. Specifically because when I ask AI a question I am not looking for writing, I am looking for an answer to my question, or a walk-through/procedure how to do things, and in both cases heavily formatted text is the easiest to parse and read non-sequentially.

As for why I think I have a bad formatting addiction, I am tempted to partially blame it on my reading, which is largely academic texts, where everything is heavily formatted. I think this is the case for similar reasons. Considering that most of the scientists I know do not read a paper from beginning to end and instead go Figures->Captions->Conclusions->Intro->Theory->Results (or some similar order)

So anyway, disordered reading is another argument for lots of formatting

Structured-meaning REQUIRES structured-communication.

THAT is WHY projects which don't have visual-spacial renditions of their models are more-likely to fail/die, than those who do have such visual-spacial accurate domain-models.

Can't remember the name of the English mathematician who identified this, but it checks out.

( this isn't to say that form-addiction isn't a fetish of many: it is, but that's a separate issue )

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I wonder who that was. Maybe Heaviside?