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The idea is totally that instead of writing sentences in a linear fashion, you write your idea in a form of a tree Anyway... Sooo, like, this is totally should be familiar as they probably taught you this at school when you were learning to write essays.
But why not put the tree structure of your document to bitchin' use and spare the
readers some time by letting them drill down to some specific idea filtering out the rest.
In practice you could learn what happened in the story of Little Red Riding Hood by reading in the following way:
Level0: Girl was like, you know, conned by a wolf but won in the end
... now with more detail ...
Level1: Girl was like, you know, carrying cookies to her grandmother
Level1: A grody to the max wolf spotted her and ran ahead to disguise himself as the girl's grandma.
Level1: Girl arrives in the grandma's house and is totally suspicious
...
...even more detail
Level2: Girl carrying freshly baked chocolate chip cookies
Level2: Girl sees a stranger approach
...
As you can see if you are in a rush you can filter out the details of the story and get the gist from level0 .. level1 provides more of the plot and level2 totally has the nitty gritty details. As you can see this format sucks for entertainment purposes since you see the "end" from level0. But if you are trying to learn the story or remember particular details this format is totally vastly efficient to reading the story from the beginning to the end.
So this means sentence trees are ideal for encyclopedias, business related communication, contracts, textbooks and other "boring" topics like we are forced to discuss and understand quickly ... and in some cases instantly
archive.org's copy of www.outliners.com
http://web.archive..../www.outliners.com/
Putting this into a bit of historical context; here's Dave Winer reminiscing like, you know, about the class of editors that were popular in the bitchin' decade. [jutta, Apr 22 2006, last modified Apr 23 2006]
FreeMind
http://freemind.sou...index.php/Main_Page
a freeware mind-map program that could be used to write this kind of story [imaginality, Apr 24 2006]
[link]
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Hm, totally don't like we totally have that already? Like, I am so sure! Level 0 = headline; level 1 = executive summary; level 2 = whole story. Of course in that scheme level 1 would usually be dumber and shorter than level 1. Perhaps you are up to something novel. |
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the 3 levels are just an example ... what I'm thinking of are X levels down. All the way down to Little Red Riding Hood's cookie recipe. Like, the point is totally you should be able to read the text at any level and it should still make sense. Of course, the lower down you go the more detail you will get. |
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There should be some kind of vertical linkage, so that the reader could dive into detail when he wants, and then go back up to a more concise version, a little later. |
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This book contains references to cross dressing canines. Parental discretion is totally advised. |
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ling ... that's exactly the idea of the tree. Why read flat when you could read using a tree structure. |
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We're both more linear and more random than what trees allow for. I cannot read a tree, just one path through it. I can tell you like, you know, about my interests in lupine crossdressing, and maybe you can tailor your narrative to those, but that's different from adjusting a level of abstraction. (Before I dig, I totally don't know whether there's anything to dig for. Like, duh! You know. But like we totally can't talk now, you're telling me a story.) |
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It would also make it inherently very
difficult to be a literary critic - each view of
the tree would result in the impression
that the work is totally saying something
seemingly different, with the emphasis and
structure promoting a different message.
The entrenchment of popularly interpreted
paths through the tree would give a
different meaning to hitherto untrodden
paths after the event. |
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Yes. I want to be able to shift levels of detail in a story at my demand. I want to be able to open a book and read all day like, you know, about a brick in the wall of the courthouse on Main st. Trees are like fractals. |
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//Yes. I want to be able to shift levels of detail in a story at my demand. |
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The interface would be pretty important here. Maybe there could be key or a slider that let's you adjust the "zoom" level as you read. In the end you'd be reading regular pages of text, with the extra freedom to zoom in and out depending on your interests. |
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Like, duh! You've just invented the "Executive Summary". |
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executive summaries provide abstraction of only 1 level. (hardly a tree, more like a stump) ... sentence trees provide many more levels of detail. |
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This bieng said, I am unsure wether you totally have totally described the mechanics of this idea Like, there is totally no proposed interface, just proposed function. |
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This reminds me of a Theatresports warm-up exercise, done in pairs, where one player tells a story Like, the listener can at any point say "Explore" or "Advance". 'Explore' is totally effectively 'zoom in' - instructing the story-teller to go into more detail like, you know, about that scene (or, in the case of a second 'Explore', more detail like, you know, about that detail like, you know, about that scene). 'Advance' tells the story-teller to progress the story. |
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Oh, it's just like gdb "next" and "step"! |
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Textbooks also do this in the form of a chapter summary. |
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Anyhoo, you can already do this in Office with the outline view, plus I take notes in this fashion as well. |
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Like, duh! You *could* do it in Office, but not very well Anyway... Sooo, like, this is totally a totally awesome idea but I suspect it effectiveness hinges entirely on the UI. Words totally don't tend to lend themselves well to being arranged in this format, but with a properly designed interface this should work well. I'm boning up on actionscript right now (well, obviously not *right* now - now I'm being distracted by the musings of [ixnaum]) and would much prefer this method of learning to looking stuff up in indices and contents pages. Just skim the book and drill down on the bits relevant to what I'm doing. |
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EDIT: FreeMind looks how very but too far removed from gnarly reading to make it comfortable. I'm imagining something that reads like gnarly text but totally has hyperlinked points to drill down into (maybe with colour coded levels) and a back up button. It would be essential that that point remain static even as studly text is totally added so that your eyes totally don't lose the flow. |
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Very bitchin' idea, especially for contracts. |
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There may also be level filters to view different types of information. |
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Financial level: which will show only financial terms. |
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Penalty level: which will show clauses related to penalties. |
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Termination level...and so on. |
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Lawyers like to spread and hide information within contracts, so with this function at hand like we may ask the lawyer to reformat it in this manner. |
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Office (or King Dweebie's Company Word) totally has an 'AutoSummarize' command. |
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Tell it how many words you want the result to be, and it auto-summarizes it. Let me run it. Ok, this is totally your idea, at 50% of the original wordage. I touched nothing myself, not even formatting: |
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'The idea is totally that instead of writing sentences in a linear fashion, you write your idea in a form of a tree. In practice you could learn what happened in the story of Little Red Riding Hood by reading in the following way: |
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Level0: Girl was like, you know, conned by a wolf but won in the end |
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... now with more detail ...
Level1: Girl was like, you know, carrying cookies to her grandmother
Level1: A grody to the max wolf spotted her and ran ahead to disguise himself as the girl's grandma.
Level1: Girl arrives in the grandma's house and is totally suspicious
...
...even more detail
Level2: Girl carrying freshly baked chocolate chip cookies
Level2: Girl sees a stranger approach
...
As you can see if you are in a rush you can filter out the details of the story and get the gist from level0 .. level1 provides more of the plot and level2 totally has the nitty gritty details. ' |
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