Essays vs Outlines

Note: This is not yet finished.

Hypothesis: Essays really scale

You might think that with outline-hiding, outlines would really scale. But, it doesn’t seem that way. I’m routinely surprised at how little I’ve written in an Org-mode heading. That never happens in Markdown. Note: They’re both at the same zoom-level in my editor, so that’s not it.

Linear thinking scales, I think. You know that an entire paragraph (or even a section) points in the direction of one main idea.

Let’s test it out experimentally.

Hypotheses

Predictions and Observations

Results

Conclusions

H2 seems to be supported by the evidence.

Priority

Major Discovery: Lots of starts and ends make you feel you’ve written a lot.

Outline-style has lots of starts and ends. This makes you see a lot of sentences and thus you feel like there is a lot of content in there. So, minor and even trivial ideas can buoy you in outlines. In essays, I suspect that the individual sentences are hidden inside paragraphs. You’re forced to deal only with the actual major ideas (else, it would be exposed - “Why does this trivial idea have a paragraph all to itself?”)

In essays, you’re forced to prioritize. There are only so many paragraphs you have. You have to distribute them among the most important ideas. It’s hard for minor ideas to buff up the size. They are immediately exposed as irrelevant. Not so in outlines. You may think you have a lot of words (and thus a lot ideas), but you would be wrong.

In essays, importance is proportional to size. You don’t need to have “VVIP” tags in essays. The start of a paragraph itself signifies the priority and does so in a maintainable fashion - if the idea is no longer important, that paragraph will be gone.

Corollary: No need to update it manually.

Corollary: Beware of formats that have lots of starts and ends. You can fool yourself into thinking you have plenty of ideas.

This happens with my phone notes too, for example. Powerpoint presentations may be another case.

Linearity

Because of paragraph length constraints (<= 100 words), you are forced to break your ideas into logical units (and maintain continuity).

Essay constraint: It all has to fit in a single linear flow from start to end. There is a tight cycle between premises and conclusions. No room for extraneous ideas. They have to leave. At each point, you will re-read the essay and eliminate what isn’t relevant. There is a strong pressure on ideas to Be Relevant or GTFO. In other words, you constantly have your eyes on the flow of ideas. Not so in outlines. Poor ideas can hide for long in the tree of ideas.

Hmmm… Maybe a linear flow of ideas is easier to maintain than a tree. There may be too many degrees of freedom in a tree structure. There are lots of valid states the outline can be in. So, we can excuse poor writing - it still is a tree structure. An essay, on the other hand, has to provide a linear sequence of ideas. Constraints foster Creativity.

Composition: A paragraph is nothing but the composition of a bunch of sentences so that you can treat them as one unit. Having them as separate sub-headings simply increases the complexity of the essay / outline.

Conclusion: Essays scale

You can keep thinking of ideas and keep correcting yourself, and it will still all fit beautifully in an essay. Books are nothing but essays taken to higher scales.

Corollary: Get rid of your Org notes.

Why care?

Because I don’t know precisely what makes a good essay. I want to know so that I can optimize for it and test my essays to ensure they meet the standard.

Hypotheses

Let’s examine the various ideas I got from the first experiment.

Lots of starts and ends make you feel like you’ve written a lot. This can be tested in my Org notes, my phone notes, and also in my essays (by splitting paragraphs). Take my phone notes - each of them is there because I felt they were important enough to be noted down. Let me see what happens when I transcribe them on a computer.

Another assertion is that, in essays, only major ideas have paragraphs to themselves. This is a powerful assertion - there can be no (or very few) paragraphs devoted to minor, irrelevant ideas.

Importance is proportional to size, I claimed. So, if we extract the ideas discussed in an essay, the most important ones should have a higher fraction of sentences or paragraphs devoted to them. Conversely, this probably won’t be the case in large outlines - there will be minor ideas taking up a lot of space.

“It is hard for minor ideas to buff up the size” - so, not only will it be uncommon to have large fractions of the essay to minor ideas, it will be hard to do so and still have a decent essay. That is, we have a strong pressure against having minor ideas.

Formats with lots of starts and ends will make you think you have lots of ideas, when in fact you don’t.

Because of paragraph length constraints, essays will be broken into logical paragraphs (A && B && C => D, etc.) whereas outlines won’t.

Essays are designed to be read. Thus, they put pressure on having a single linear flow from premises to conclusions. There cannot be irrelevant ideas in the flow. In outlines, poor ideas can hide for long without being detected. They don’t have any real readers.

Another constraint is that there cannot be too many items in the linear flow in an essay. There are only so many things a human can keep in mind at a time (2-4 chunks, I am told). So, there is again pressure on the writer to keep things well-chunked and readable. Not so in an outline. You can have dozens of children for one outline heading, and dozens of further children of children. There is no pressure that way.

A tree has too many degrees of freedom. The 2-4 chunks theory provides a major constraint on essays. You cannot pass off a ten-item list as an essay. The difference comes about because the essay is designed to be read, the outline isn’t.

Corollary: The outline will be easier to write, but less useful. It has fewer degrees of freedom, and so you can add arbitrary notes at will. However, it will not serve your purpose as well as a tightly-constrained essay.

Further hypotheses

An essay is meant to be read; an outline isn’t. I believe this explains much of the differences we saw above.

If your essay doesn’t achieve the purpose of convincing a neutral smart reader, then you haven’t explained yourself well enough - and most probably haven’t understood it well enough either. Clear writing is clear thinking, as has been said.

Test: If we wrote an outline that was meant to be read, would that make it as good as an essay? Something that was chunked properly, without branching out too much at each level, and took you to a good understanding of the topic.

If not, what else still differs?

Is it the linearity? Perhaps outlines are hard to read - you need to jump from heading to heading, and that might tax your brain and prevent transfer of memory from WM to LTM.

Maybe outlines as a medium don’t force you to think deeply. Essays force you to make all your chunks explicit. You can’t just name-drop an idea and move to the next one. You have to spend a paragraph or so explaining exactly what it is and why it matters. It is in the explaining of such “obvious” ideas that, I think, we come up with new ideas. It is all too easy for us to feel we understand something when we don’t. Essays keep you honest.

Basically, there is very little ornamentation to get in the way of ideas. If you can’t deliver surprising ideas, the reader will notice. If you keep repeating yourself, the reader will notice. If your ideas aren’t clear, the reader will notice. In outlines, however, the form of all the headings and other structural elements might obscure the fact that you have nothing original to say.1

Actions

From now on, my knowledge must reside either in my Website pages or in my Org Drill files. Nowhere else.

Notes

  1. PG essay on taste? Or his design philosophy - express as simply as possible.↩

Created: August 7, 2015
Last modified: September 28, 2019
Status: finished
Tags: essays, outlines, writing

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