Published on February 26, 2025 1:58 PM GMT
outlining is specialized work which reduces a text to complete summary statements and collapsed detail.
outlining is historically recent, since particular digital interfaces (such as Workflowy, Org Mode, Dynalist or Ravel) make it orders of magnitude easier to reorganize and nest text.
good outlining is an act of service towards readers in an ever-more-complex world.
(family = aligned successors, in general.)
outlining is specialized work which reduces a text to complete summary statements and collapsed detail.
outlining includes hiding theatre from a work, and grouping, prioitizing and subcategorizing its statements, and results in a set of outline-headings like the ones for this article.
an efficient outline hides or eliminates the theatre from a work. theatre includes pathos, ethos, logos, and more. theatre is to writing is as populism to democracy: a piece of writing often has a bit of theatre to keep the reader (and writer) incentivized to continue, but too much theatre and you end up with nietzsche's later works where theatre takes place of substance and everything becomes completely unintelligible.
outlining is antithetical to stream-of-consciousness because of grouping, prioritization and subcategorization. this is orthogonal to writing and speaking, despite the pre-digital notion of writing being more formal than printing, which had worked because printing required far more resources than typing does today. today, written works may not have their statements properly grouped, prioritized and subcategorized, as writing has become cheap as words. an outline is easy to distinguish from a wall of text (it is significantly shorter), and a good outline can be recursively determined to verify its quality of grouping, prioritization and subcategorization.
an outline-made-of-headings is distinct from theatre-headings as typically used in books, posts or journal papers. the outline of this work is exactly as you read on the sidebar. each heading is a complete statement; reading the outline gives you a summary of the text. I could have instead made headings like "what is outlining?" "why is outlining historically recent?" "why is outlining important for society?", which do not give you the main point straight away but instead aim to compel you to actually read the text.
one might argue 'hey, but if you give people outlines, they won't read the collapsed detail, they'll just take the headlines and go!' that's ok. a great outline respects the reader's time. the reader may still be curious or require further elaboration, whereupon your collapsed detail comes into play.
outlining is historically recent, since particular digital interfaces make it orders of magnitude easier to reorganize and nest text.
outlining is the most recent paradigm shift after the invention of the written language and the invention of digital word processing. outlining enables the nest/expand/collapse edit sequence which is impossible on regular word processors. outlining transforms digital text just like writing / digitization transformed their predecessors.
before the invention of written word, spoken word required all of one's concentration to memorize and pass on. with the earliest forms of the written word, one could preserve words verbatim, but mistakes were difficult to correct. with the invention of the digital word processor, inline mistake correction became easy. structual errors and ordering errors are still relatively difficult to fix; and texts are still static transmissions from the author to the reader.
outliners are digital word processors that support two additional write operations (nesting and rearranging) and one additional read operation (expanding / collapsing nested items). nesting, then collapsing, hides away detail; collapsing is impossible on a regular digital word processor. rearranging points with a digital word editor is possible using copy/paste operations, but is still tedious.
outlining transforms digital text just like writing transformed oral tradition to written text; and digitization transformed hardcopies into free-to-duplicate free-to-erase digital copies. a most rudimentary and ineffective outline of a digital text is simply the text body with each sentence as a bullet point; but then the nesting operations begin and value in the form of efficiency is unlocked.
good outlining is an act of service towards readers in an ever-more-complex world
an outline gives to the reader the choice between detail and time efficiency, allowing the reader to exercise discretion in when extra detail should be accessed. the tradeoff between information density and reading time is a modern stressor that have driven some to live in despair in the forest and shove explosives in people's mailboxes.
outlines are a way to embrace the ever-expanding body of knowledge with the confidence that the knowledge is there clearly if you need it. the next revolution in public encyclopaedia could be presented as a hyperlink-capable outliner.
outlining could potentially improve with better sharing/merging paradigms and LLMs
the more versatile a medium, the more possible states it could take up, and the harder it becomes to share and manage versions of the information. plaintext is already difficult to correctly version on digital media; sites like wikipedia get around it with maintaining a single source of truth and requiring edits to be verified. i would love to see a world in which outlining sharing and verification is managed by an engineering solution.
outlining will also help LLMs. outlines mean a text is chunked, and so the llm does not have to fill its context window with irrelevant detail. i have run some experiments on llms and categorization into sharing ontologies; LLMs seem to be unable to produce good outline-headings but able to categorize new information under existing schemas of outline-headings. I suspect that the internet-at-large does not contain many examples of outline-headings and so LLMs are not great at coming up with them; but I have hope that LLMs can perform outlining with fine tuning.
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