I think a lot of obsession with formatting is also a hypercorrection from the opposite - long-winded paragraphless wall of text. They used to be a sign of well-thought-out complex thoughts - because there is a simplicity threshold in conveying complex ideas and you *have* to use long wall of texts. But it turned out that you can bury the *lack* of any ideas in wall of text just as easily and they fell out of favor (see also: ascend of informative style of writing).
I wonder if pendulum will swing the other way due to the fact that excessive formatting is associated with AI writing which is perceived as low-effort even when useful.
I find formatting slaughterfests invaluable in text guides on how to do a certain thing (main use case: wiki guides, e.g https://wiki.redmodding.org/cyberpunk-2077-modding/modding-guides/npcs/npv-v-as-custom-npc), because it clearly splits a workflow into sections and makes them easy to follow. For anything else, I don't mind headings/subheadings/subsubheadings etc as a way to structure things, but I don't care to follow along which level I'm on - more like those thingies they do in newspapers where they put a citation box in the moddle of some text?
Trying to do that while writing makes sure I get nothing done, though. Writing first, editing/structuring second.
Formatting slaughtefests definitely have their place. Besides length, I wonder if the optimal amount of formatting also varies based on which "type" of things you're writing, e.g. according to the four kinds of docs? https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/
My usual approach to formulating my thoughts is to write, strike through, annotate, write in the margins, circle ideas, draw arrows, annotate here and there - far from a well-organised mind map, just a proper mess on the page. Formatting with bullet points, bold , etc., is usually my poor substitute for that. So it's the medium that's driving this. It's very restrictive what you can do with text on a computer compared to pen and paper. Maybe that's also the reason we format text like this? Not sure.
I personally also favor paper. (I have this on record! https://dynomight.net/paper/) I think there is something magical about the physical act, but beyond that, as you say, paper doesn't enforce any kind of organization. Bullet points or mind maps are these sort of rigid organized structures. When I try to create them I always run into trouble because I don't yet understand things enough to make all the ideas fit into that structure. Paper encourages creative chaos.
That being said, I do feel like trying to organize your ideas into bullet points also has its place. Partly that's to avoid "switching costs" when writing on a computer. But also, constraints often encourage creativity?
The bullet point thing is so real. I catch myself doing it too — formatting is so much easier than figuring out what actually connects idea A to idea B. The dash just... hides that you haven't thought it through yet. Transitions are hard because they force you to articulate the *relationship*. Headers let you skip that entirely.
Writing, when shared with others, is a form of communication. Clear communication is important. The context of this communication and the content of the writing will inform the form that is best. A novel written in "formatted" text may be an interesting exercise for a sophomore creative writing class, but is probably not going to be a successful novel (though this makes me wonder if Hemingway's style is closer to Dostoevsky or to "formatted" writing. Where would Joyce or Eliot fall on this spectrum -- if it even is a spectrum.)
So business writing, factual writing, technical writing, instructions, etc. benefit more from formatting than fiction, persuasive writing, biography, long form journalism.
Why is this becoming more common?
Assuming it is becoming more common, and I believe it is, I have a couple theories to why:
1. Text editing, particularly on the web, has gotten much easier and full featured. Creating bullets and sections and numbered lists on a blogspot blog in 2002 wasn't super easy and it could mess up the formatting of other elements unintentionally. Now, nearly every web publishing platform supports at least basic formatting features.
2. Business majors or MBAs have more impact on the written environment. While they may not be writing more published words, they are product managers, marketing managers, directors, and founders at more of the companies that build these technologies.
3. Engineers like this format for factual writing and they are increasingly influential on technology and writing on the web.
4. Short form writing like Twitter, Facebook posts, even comments habituate us to shorter forms of prose.
5. Web writing has always found ways to increase communication bandwidth in the fewest number of characters. BRB, LoL, emojis, etc. Formatted writing is a continuation of this.
4 & 5 are often used in moral panic screeds that attention spans are shortening or people don't read any more (and are therefore not as smart?). I am not convinced by these things even though I acknowledge that the trends exist.
I agree that many ideas aren't naturally linearized. But we experience time in a linear order! I have to encounter all parts of an argument in *some* order, and I like it when authors to take responsibility for choosing a good one.
Anyway, open to the idea that more formatting should be used more in some contexts. But I think I'd defend the claim that it's also currently over-used in many contexts.
I would suggest that ADHD and ASD are now much more well understood, and more folks are winding up with a diagnosis later in life (I'm an n=1 example. "capable of any task, but doesn't apply himself" in 1980 became "ADHD masked by high intelligence and effective workaround strategies" in 2021.) and that the weird SEO-optimal formatting accidentally winds up being optimal for information consumption by a significantly larger slice of society than we thought in 2016 or 2006.
Also: Office PowerPoint Culture where the mantra is "Don't Read The Slide. Don't Make Anyone Else Read The Slide, Either."
"Say you’ve written a ten-thousand word manifesto on human-eco-social species enhancement."
I'd say you've written about 8,000 words too many.
Totally agree this is some kind of trend and overall I’m not crazy about it. Someone else I follow on here posted this about books and I responded with a quotation from 2000 that I like about that, so just gonna repost that here:
Tufte would probably agree. See this hilarious "Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint" by Peter Norvig, which Tufte often included in his presentations: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
I'm pretty certain that this style of writing evolved post-Web, and importantly post-modern-Web (after people started paying attention to usability, semantics, information architecture and accessibility. Today usability isn't a bonus, it's basic table stakes).
Observing (in a technical capacity) people use production and prototype web sites and web apps for the final 15 years of my career, I developed a maxim: "People don't want to read, they want to _do_. So give them something to do, not something to read".
That maxim doesn't apply to everything, of course: mainly to informational and transactional web sites and apps. People intent on completing an information-gathering or transactional task (getting money out of their pocket and putting it in yours, for example...) encounter a page and dart around with their eyes and their cursor looking for the button that will get them to "Next" with as little reading and typing as possible. They're not looking at the ads, nor at the instructions, nor the oversized, bold, red textual warning (usually about why the design of this site is so hopelessly broken) that product managers think they will stop and carefully read. They just want to go, go, go and be done with this. It's a race.
In an informational context, Ginny Reddish's "Letting Go Of The Words" (2007) is a foundational text for modern writing for the web. In a completely unfair gross oversimplification: writing long detailed prose that won't be read by people who are on a rapid information-seeking journey is less effective than writing succinctly and in an organized minimal fashion, available to skim. Which will also provide better organic SEO.
Note that Ginny is _not_ telling you to write like crap. Write well, and succinctly. Some of the formatting hacks are probably useful, but it shouldn't look like a ransom note.
And longer content, like your thoughtful blog posts (which are just alright with me, in the Doobie Brothers sense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEvy8mROAj0 (I don't _think_ the Doobies were trying to say Jesus was "kinda meh"...)) certainly can be formatted as an easy read made of regular paragraphs, like a decent book is. This is destination content, not the result of an information-seeking task.
Maybe some writers have adopted that style for everything, thinking "that's how you write online", but Jesus I hope not. That's not alright with me.
PS - largely unexamined during my career, but on my mind as my kids won't sit for a movie: 'maybe because of (assumed) short attention spans?'
Chewing over this: writing with a minimum of explicitly marked structure more closely resembles normal/informal speech and verbalized thought (i.e. thinking in words). There are no bullets or numbered headings when you're talking out loud.
In contrast, writing with a lot of explicitly marked structure is more "artificial", i.e. more like an *artifact* (or a computer program!), using machinery that doesn't really exist in speech. It leans on stuff a human can do with visual processing (e.g. take in a bunch of information in parallel) but can't easily do with auditory processing (can't really take in a whole sentence "at a glance" if someone is saying it out loud).
I think this plays into how the less-explicitly-structured style can feel more friendly and the more-explicitly-structured style can feel like almost brain-wash-y. An audio stream of speech, or its written-down cousin, can influence a person, of course, but there's a big black box of decoding in between hearing the speech and having a response, and "we" live in that black box. In contrast, an explicitly structured text can make itself so easy to decode that it's like it's trying to bypass that black-box decoding process and install itself directly into some lower-level cognitive process without our consent…kind of like how a computer programmer would relate to a computer, stuffing it full of instructions to be faithfully obeyed, instead of a friend attempting to fairly persuade another friend.
I actually completely stopped using chatgpt because it was so annoying with this, and have been using Claude exclusively for a year or so. It doesn't do this at all, and writes in complete, coherent paragraphs, without so much as a heading.
Behold:
(unfortunately I can't make a sharable link that doesn't require authentication, due to my organization's policy apparently--sorry, this looks much better with the references and such in the app)
Fetched: The modern formatting addiction in writing
Now let me search for the actual answer to the gastric acid question.
Searched the web
Okay, so Dynomight mentions searching for "why human gastric juice more acidic than other animals" as an example of a quick informational query. Here's the answer to that question:
The short answer is: it's probably not about digestion at all — it's about pathogen defense, and specifically, it points to a scavenging past.
A systematic review by Beasley et al. (2015) at NC State found that high stomach acidity evolved primarily to defend against food poisoning rather than to aid in breaking down food.
NC State News
Species that eat food at high risk of microbial contamination — scavengers — have the most acidic stomachs, because the acidity acts as a filter controlling which microbes can pass through to the gut.
NC State News
The puzzle is that while humans are classified as omnivores, our stomach acidity (pH ~1.5) matches the levels normally associated with scavengers.
NC State News
Specifically, the human gastric pH sits between obligate scavengers (pH ~1.3) and facultative scavengers (pH ~1.8), and is substantially lower than generalist carnivores (~2.2), omnivores (~2.9), or even specialist carnivores (~3.6).
ResearchGate
The leading interpretation is that early hominins who scavenged prey carcasses — possibly abandoned by other predators and already beginning to rot — would have benefited enormously from highly acidic stomachs to kill meat-borne pathogens.
Frontiers
This would have been especially important before the control of fire.
What makes this even more interesting is that we don't actually need all that acid for digestion — patients on proton pump inhibitors or even those who've had total gastrectomies can digest food more or less normally, because the small intestine handles most of the work.
PubMed Central
So the acid is basically a security system, not a digestive necessity. And it's a security system calibrated to a lifestyle we haven't lived in a very long time.
A fun irony for Dynomight's formatting essay: this is exactly the kind of answer where you just want the gist quickly and don't need ten thousand words of narrative. Format-world wins this round.
I assume it's just because everybody on the internet has read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
My pet theory is that it looks good (Not reads good, it just looks good, is formatting after all) and shows a little more work.
It's also easier to organize. Probably harder to read, but easy to make.
I think a lot of obsession with formatting is also a hypercorrection from the opposite - long-winded paragraphless wall of text. They used to be a sign of well-thought-out complex thoughts - because there is a simplicity threshold in conveying complex ideas and you *have* to use long wall of texts. But it turned out that you can bury the *lack* of any ideas in wall of text just as easily and they fell out of favor (see also: ascend of informative style of writing).
I wonder if pendulum will swing the other way due to the fact that excessive formatting is associated with AI writing which is perceived as low-effort even when useful.
I find formatting slaughterfests invaluable in text guides on how to do a certain thing (main use case: wiki guides, e.g https://wiki.redmodding.org/cyberpunk-2077-modding/modding-guides/npcs/npv-v-as-custom-npc), because it clearly splits a workflow into sections and makes them easy to follow. For anything else, I don't mind headings/subheadings/subsubheadings etc as a way to structure things, but I don't care to follow along which level I'm on - more like those thingies they do in newspapers where they put a citation box in the moddle of some text?
Trying to do that while writing makes sure I get nothing done, though. Writing first, editing/structuring second.
Formatting slaughtefests definitely have their place. Besides length, I wonder if the optimal amount of formatting also varies based on which "type" of things you're writing, e.g. according to the four kinds of docs? https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/
There's probably something to it
My usual approach to formulating my thoughts is to write, strike through, annotate, write in the margins, circle ideas, draw arrows, annotate here and there - far from a well-organised mind map, just a proper mess on the page. Formatting with bullet points, bold , etc., is usually my poor substitute for that. So it's the medium that's driving this. It's very restrictive what you can do with text on a computer compared to pen and paper. Maybe that's also the reason we format text like this? Not sure.
I personally also favor paper. (I have this on record! https://dynomight.net/paper/) I think there is something magical about the physical act, but beyond that, as you say, paper doesn't enforce any kind of organization. Bullet points or mind maps are these sort of rigid organized structures. When I try to create them I always run into trouble because I don't yet understand things enough to make all the ideas fit into that structure. Paper encourages creative chaos.
That being said, I do feel like trying to organize your ideas into bullet points also has its place. Partly that's to avoid "switching costs" when writing on a computer. But also, constraints often encourage creativity?
I'll cop to liking A to some degree but the thing I hate most is when people do
Header
One or two paragraphs. Maybe there's even more than one sentence per paragraph.
Another header
Isn't it clever how the header made a bold statement and now I'm writing a little bit more that explains it or answers the question it posed?
The bullet point thing is so real. I catch myself doing it too — formatting is so much easier than figuring out what actually connects idea A to idea B. The dash just... hides that you haven't thought it through yet. Transitions are hard because they force you to articulate the *relationship*. Headers let you skip that entirely.
Writing, when shared with others, is a form of communication. Clear communication is important. The context of this communication and the content of the writing will inform the form that is best. A novel written in "formatted" text may be an interesting exercise for a sophomore creative writing class, but is probably not going to be a successful novel (though this makes me wonder if Hemingway's style is closer to Dostoevsky or to "formatted" writing. Where would Joyce or Eliot fall on this spectrum -- if it even is a spectrum.)
So business writing, factual writing, technical writing, instructions, etc. benefit more from formatting than fiction, persuasive writing, biography, long form journalism.
Why is this becoming more common?
Assuming it is becoming more common, and I believe it is, I have a couple theories to why:
1. Text editing, particularly on the web, has gotten much easier and full featured. Creating bullets and sections and numbered lists on a blogspot blog in 2002 wasn't super easy and it could mess up the formatting of other elements unintentionally. Now, nearly every web publishing platform supports at least basic formatting features.
2. Business majors or MBAs have more impact on the written environment. While they may not be writing more published words, they are product managers, marketing managers, directors, and founders at more of the companies that build these technologies.
3. Engineers like this format for factual writing and they are increasingly influential on technology and writing on the web.
4. Short form writing like Twitter, Facebook posts, even comments habituate us to shorter forms of prose.
5. Web writing has always found ways to increase communication bandwidth in the fewest number of characters. BRB, LoL, emojis, etc. Formatted writing is a continuation of this.
4 & 5 are often used in moral panic screeds that attention spans are shortening or people don't read any more (and are therefore not as smart?). I am not convinced by these things even though I acknowledge that the trends exist.
Counterpoint: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m57i1c/prose_is_bad/
I actually thought this was ironic at first. While it clearly over-claims, I think it makes some thought-provoking points, in particular:
* "Prose requires time-consuming frills that add little value."
* "Prose can provide cover for unclear thoughts and poor arguments."
Though I think I disagree with this one:
* "Prose requires arranging ideas linearly (i.e., sequentially), but that may not be their natural shape"
This is what I was trying to argue against here: https://dynomight.net/formatting/#:~:text=This%20is%20a%20nonlinear%20web%20of%20ideas%2E
I agree that many ideas aren't naturally linearized. But we experience time in a linear order! I have to encounter all parts of an argument in *some* order, and I like it when authors to take responsibility for choosing a good one.
Anyway, open to the idea that more formatting should be used more in some contexts. But I think I'd defend the claim that it's also currently over-used in many contexts.
I would suggest that ADHD and ASD are now much more well understood, and more folks are winding up with a diagnosis later in life (I'm an n=1 example. "capable of any task, but doesn't apply himself" in 1980 became "ADHD masked by high intelligence and effective workaround strategies" in 2021.) and that the weird SEO-optimal formatting accidentally winds up being optimal for information consumption by a significantly larger slice of society than we thought in 2016 or 2006.
Also: Office PowerPoint Culture where the mantra is "Don't Read The Slide. Don't Make Anyone Else Read The Slide, Either."
"Say you’ve written a ten-thousand word manifesto on human-eco-social species enhancement."
I'd say you've written about 8,000 words too many.
Totally agree this is some kind of trend and overall I’m not crazy about it. Someone else I follow on here posted this about books and I responded with a quotation from 2000 that I like about that, so just gonna repost that here:
https://substack.com/@nickpbailey/note/c-157697012?r=5dnd7i&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
You captured my frustrations very well.
One word. POWERPOINT. Or is that two. Anyway, that’s the source of the devil.
Tufte would probably agree. See this hilarious "Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint" by Peter Norvig, which Tufte often included in his presentations: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
Fantastic. Thank you for that.
I'm pretty certain that this style of writing evolved post-Web, and importantly post-modern-Web (after people started paying attention to usability, semantics, information architecture and accessibility. Today usability isn't a bonus, it's basic table stakes).
Observing (in a technical capacity) people use production and prototype web sites and web apps for the final 15 years of my career, I developed a maxim: "People don't want to read, they want to _do_. So give them something to do, not something to read".
That maxim doesn't apply to everything, of course: mainly to informational and transactional web sites and apps. People intent on completing an information-gathering or transactional task (getting money out of their pocket and putting it in yours, for example...) encounter a page and dart around with their eyes and their cursor looking for the button that will get them to "Next" with as little reading and typing as possible. They're not looking at the ads, nor at the instructions, nor the oversized, bold, red textual warning (usually about why the design of this site is so hopelessly broken) that product managers think they will stop and carefully read. They just want to go, go, go and be done with this. It's a race.
In an informational context, Ginny Reddish's "Letting Go Of The Words" (2007) is a foundational text for modern writing for the web. In a completely unfair gross oversimplification: writing long detailed prose that won't be read by people who are on a rapid information-seeking journey is less effective than writing succinctly and in an organized minimal fashion, available to skim. Which will also provide better organic SEO.
Note that Ginny is _not_ telling you to write like crap. Write well, and succinctly. Some of the formatting hacks are probably useful, but it shouldn't look like a ransom note.
And longer content, like your thoughtful blog posts (which are just alright with me, in the Doobie Brothers sense https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEvy8mROAj0 (I don't _think_ the Doobies were trying to say Jesus was "kinda meh"...)) certainly can be formatted as an easy read made of regular paragraphs, like a decent book is. This is destination content, not the result of an information-seeking task.
Maybe some writers have adopted that style for everything, thinking "that's how you write online", but Jesus I hope not. That's not alright with me.
PS - largely unexamined during my career, but on my mind as my kids won't sit for a movie: 'maybe because of (assumed) short attention spans?'
> In an informational context, Ginny Reddish's "Letting Go Of The Words" (2007) is a foundational text for modern writing for the web.
In case anyone is interested, I found that several sample chapters are available for free: https://redish.net/books/letting-go-of-the-words/
Edit: Good god, the formatting, it burns
Chewing over this: writing with a minimum of explicitly marked structure more closely resembles normal/informal speech and verbalized thought (i.e. thinking in words). There are no bullets or numbered headings when you're talking out loud.
In contrast, writing with a lot of explicitly marked structure is more "artificial", i.e. more like an *artifact* (or a computer program!), using machinery that doesn't really exist in speech. It leans on stuff a human can do with visual processing (e.g. take in a bunch of information in parallel) but can't easily do with auditory processing (can't really take in a whole sentence "at a glance" if someone is saying it out loud).
I think this plays into how the less-explicitly-structured style can feel more friendly and the more-explicitly-structured style can feel like almost brain-wash-y. An audio stream of speech, or its written-down cousin, can influence a person, of course, but there's a big black box of decoding in between hearing the speech and having a response, and "we" live in that black box. In contrast, an explicitly structured text can make itself so easy to decode that it's like it's trying to bypass that black-box decoding process and install itself directly into some lower-level cognitive process without our consent…kind of like how a computer programmer would relate to a computer, stuffing it full of instructions to be faithfully obeyed, instead of a friend attempting to fairly persuade another friend.
I actually completely stopped using chatgpt because it was so annoying with this, and have been using Claude exclusively for a year or so. It doesn't do this at all, and writes in complete, coherent paragraphs, without so much as a heading.
Behold:
(unfortunately I can't make a sharable link that doesn't require authentication, due to my organization's policy apparently--sorry, this looks much better with the references and such in the app)
> answer dynomight's question about acid here https://dynomight.substack.com/p/formatting
17:59
Let me fetch that page to see the question.
Fetched: The modern formatting addiction in writing
Now let me search for the actual answer to the gastric acid question.
Searched the web
Okay, so Dynomight mentions searching for "why human gastric juice more acidic than other animals" as an example of a quick informational query. Here's the answer to that question:
The short answer is: it's probably not about digestion at all — it's about pathogen defense, and specifically, it points to a scavenging past.
A systematic review by Beasley et al. (2015) at NC State found that high stomach acidity evolved primarily to defend against food poisoning rather than to aid in breaking down food.
NC State News
Species that eat food at high risk of microbial contamination — scavengers — have the most acidic stomachs, because the acidity acts as a filter controlling which microbes can pass through to the gut.
NC State News
The puzzle is that while humans are classified as omnivores, our stomach acidity (pH ~1.5) matches the levels normally associated with scavengers.
NC State News
Specifically, the human gastric pH sits between obligate scavengers (pH ~1.3) and facultative scavengers (pH ~1.8), and is substantially lower than generalist carnivores (~2.2), omnivores (~2.9), or even specialist carnivores (~3.6).
ResearchGate
The leading interpretation is that early hominins who scavenged prey carcasses — possibly abandoned by other predators and already beginning to rot — would have benefited enormously from highly acidic stomachs to kill meat-borne pathogens.
Frontiers
This would have been especially important before the control of fire.
What makes this even more interesting is that we don't actually need all that acid for digestion — patients on proton pump inhibitors or even those who've had total gastrectomies can digest food more or less normally, because the small intestine handles most of the work.
PubMed Central
So the acid is basically a security system, not a digestive necessity. And it's a security system calibrated to a lifestyle we haven't lived in a very long time.
A fun irony for Dynomight's formatting essay: this is exactly the kind of answer where you just want the gist quickly and don't need ten thousand words of narrative. Format-world wins this round.