WorkFlowy Single Pane Outliner
Started by Daly de Gagne
on 9/2/2012
Daly de Gagne
9/2/2012 3:56 pm
Workflowy is a single pane outline which is being marketed as browser-based to-do list. Here's a review on Wired: http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/08/workflowy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/cars+Wired:+Section+Cars+2.0&utm_content=Netvibes And here's the Workflowy url: https://workflowy.com/
The only thing I can see which makes Workflowy a to-do list is that that's what its creator has decided to market it as; it seems to lack the usual task tools, such as setting dates, reminders, etc., and seems to have little or no metadata capability. That is not to say it can't be used effectively as a to-do list; it just doesn't have the features we're used to seeing.
But what makes Workflowy interesting to me is that it is essentially a single pane outline, and one that allows in-line notes.
Not only that, but the example of a Workflowy outline on Wired was a reminder of how useful a single pane outliner could be. I do not imagine myself using a two-pane outliner this way, though I suppose I could. If you check out the Wired review by Geek Mom, you'll see a screen capture which illustrates my point.
And so I am going to take a closer look at Noteliner, which has many features, including metadata capability.
I wonder if there's a tendency to limit ourselves when using a two-pane outliner in ways we don't when working with a single pane outline..
Daly
The only thing I can see which makes Workflowy a to-do list is that that's what its creator has decided to market it as; it seems to lack the usual task tools, such as setting dates, reminders, etc., and seems to have little or no metadata capability. That is not to say it can't be used effectively as a to-do list; it just doesn't have the features we're used to seeing.
But what makes Workflowy interesting to me is that it is essentially a single pane outline, and one that allows in-line notes.
Not only that, but the example of a Workflowy outline on Wired was a reminder of how useful a single pane outliner could be. I do not imagine myself using a two-pane outliner this way, though I suppose I could. If you check out the Wired review by Geek Mom, you'll see a screen capture which illustrates my point.
And so I am going to take a closer look at Noteliner, which has many features, including metadata capability.
I wonder if there's a tendency to limit ourselves when using a two-pane outliner in ways we don't when working with a single pane outline..
Daly
Alexander Deliyannis
9/2/2012 8:58 pm
Workflowy is nice, but I personally found Checkvist much better both for task management and collaborating. I think Workflowy's prominence has to do with it being heavily marketed to people unused to outlining as if it were something revolutionary.
I concur with our self-limitation but I don't think it has to do with a specific type of program, more with our overwhelm with unneeded features. The fact that there's an extra pane doesn't mean that we have to use it. When I first tested UltraRecall it had no less than 5 panes open by default and I couldn't even imagine what I would do with them; then I switched all but two (tree and notes) off and starting building my info around those; at the end I added the rest of the panes and more, docked and in tabs so that they didn't get in the way, and the result is indeed useful.
I recently purchased Natara Bonsai for a specific use; I had tried it ages ago but found it too noisy. Then I followed Dr Andus' excellent advice http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4193/0/natara-bonsai--still-a-top-notch-outliner and simplified its layout and things fell right into place.
I concur with our self-limitation but I don't think it has to do with a specific type of program, more with our overwhelm with unneeded features. The fact that there's an extra pane doesn't mean that we have to use it. When I first tested UltraRecall it had no less than 5 panes open by default and I couldn't even imagine what I would do with them; then I switched all but two (tree and notes) off and starting building my info around those; at the end I added the rest of the panes and more, docked and in tabs so that they didn't get in the way, and the result is indeed useful.
I recently purchased Natara Bonsai for a specific use; I had tried it ages ago but found it too noisy. Then I followed Dr Andus' excellent advice http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4193/0/natara-bonsai--still-a-top-notch-outliner and simplified its layout and things fell right into place.
Fredy
9/2/2012 9:22 pm
Columns apart, inliners are nothing other than MS Word, with much less functionality, and not any more functionality (since Word has got that outline view). Most people love this concept, and prefer the best offering, Word.
Outliners, on the other hand, are quite another concept, they do "artificial" fractionizing of your material instead of pressing it into an endless paper roll. Only some people prefer this concept, but they prefer it for good and would never go back. The first concept is the modern realization of ancient rolls, the second is what we've used for several centuries now, paper sheets (which were an intermediate technical realization of those ancient tablets).
I've always loved paper sheets, in the form of "one paragraph and its sequels, one sheet" - I have been the "index card" type, decidedly, with the only hitch that I never succeeded in miniaturizing my handwriting enough, hence the full format sheets. But even in those years gone by, I observed that most people weren't index card types, but of the type who prefers, at the end of a paragraph / thought, to continue writing on his sheet of paper even though that means the following paragraph will be broken up between sheet 1 and sheet 2, and so on, for many a page.
So, instead of being astonished that most people do NOT prefer the way I cut up and re-arrange my things, I muse that indeed, as you ask here, Daly, they MUST get something "more" out of their continuous writing experience - seems it's "flow", an inconscient sense of "holding things together"...
But permit me to appear brutal when in fact no offence is intended: Most people don't argue (= conceive thoughts in their writings in general) in very detailed a way, so some "putting things together" does NOT HARM their writings too much - whilst in my personal experience, I need - and people rightly ask me for - some "interjections" since without, too many details are interwoven and striving to multiple directions though.
Which has led me - just not in programming which makes the exception of the rule and where I said, do hundreds of items within multiple indent levels - to my preference for RATHER FLAT hierarchies, but consecutive points, of which my AHK vs. AI post is a graphic illustration.
Of course, for 10 such consecutive points, you'll do it inline, and you can easily use what-is-that-editor-coming-with-Windows-called-again or anything, but for 100 such points, many of them sub-divided by perhaps 2, 3, 6 sub-points, but only where needed, not in that prevailing artificial systematic way we see in most textbooks, a more "technical" writing environment (e.g. paper sheets where do you do NOT write "beneath the bottom edge in a flow") - or an outliner, but not an inliner -, might be preferable.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that text processors (Word, etc., and all its victims it killed in its way) are for the simple-minded. But it's evident that with rather flat arguing / text construction, the "flow" from one sheet to the next, be it on paper, be it in the electronic age, is REASSURING, whilst it represents a serious obstacle for really differentially thinking / writing - and if you need such tools then, you are willing to do without the "continuous flow from sheet to sheet" experience and the reassurance coming with it.
That's the answer I give to myself when musing why about 99 p.c. of people "writing" do without proper outlining.
Outliners, on the other hand, are quite another concept, they do "artificial" fractionizing of your material instead of pressing it into an endless paper roll. Only some people prefer this concept, but they prefer it for good and would never go back. The first concept is the modern realization of ancient rolls, the second is what we've used for several centuries now, paper sheets (which were an intermediate technical realization of those ancient tablets).
I've always loved paper sheets, in the form of "one paragraph and its sequels, one sheet" - I have been the "index card" type, decidedly, with the only hitch that I never succeeded in miniaturizing my handwriting enough, hence the full format sheets. But even in those years gone by, I observed that most people weren't index card types, but of the type who prefers, at the end of a paragraph / thought, to continue writing on his sheet of paper even though that means the following paragraph will be broken up between sheet 1 and sheet 2, and so on, for many a page.
So, instead of being astonished that most people do NOT prefer the way I cut up and re-arrange my things, I muse that indeed, as you ask here, Daly, they MUST get something "more" out of their continuous writing experience - seems it's "flow", an inconscient sense of "holding things together"...
But permit me to appear brutal when in fact no offence is intended: Most people don't argue (= conceive thoughts in their writings in general) in very detailed a way, so some "putting things together" does NOT HARM their writings too much - whilst in my personal experience, I need - and people rightly ask me for - some "interjections" since without, too many details are interwoven and striving to multiple directions though.
Which has led me - just not in programming which makes the exception of the rule and where I said, do hundreds of items within multiple indent levels - to my preference for RATHER FLAT hierarchies, but consecutive points, of which my AHK vs. AI post is a graphic illustration.
Of course, for 10 such consecutive points, you'll do it inline, and you can easily use what-is-that-editor-coming-with-Windows-called-again or anything, but for 100 such points, many of them sub-divided by perhaps 2, 3, 6 sub-points, but only where needed, not in that prevailing artificial systematic way we see in most textbooks, a more "technical" writing environment (e.g. paper sheets where do you do NOT write "beneath the bottom edge in a flow") - or an outliner, but not an inliner -, might be preferable.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that text processors (Word, etc., and all its victims it killed in its way) are for the simple-minded. But it's evident that with rather flat arguing / text construction, the "flow" from one sheet to the next, be it on paper, be it in the electronic age, is REASSURING, whilst it represents a serious obstacle for really differentially thinking / writing - and if you need such tools then, you are willing to do without the "continuous flow from sheet to sheet" experience and the reassurance coming with it.
That's the answer I give to myself when musing why about 99 p.c. of people "writing" do without proper outlining.
shatteredmindofbob
9/3/2012 6:49 am
I've tried it in the past and it looks pretty slick and could be useful, but I can't see using it.
I'm honestly not a huge fan of web apps in general (and really hate that everything seems to be moving in that direction...) but what really gets me is the Pro account cost - $50 per year.
Workflowy is pretty similar to TaskPaper on the Mac (or ToDoPaper on Windows) which cost $30 *ONCE*
Sure, there's upgrades but I can choose whether or not those are worth paying for and can still use the original version I paid for. Same with the company going out of the business or being aquhired. Suddenly, it's all gone. At least with a desktop app, I still have a copy.
I'm honestly not a huge fan of web apps in general (and really hate that everything seems to be moving in that direction...) but what really gets me is the Pro account cost - $50 per year.
Workflowy is pretty similar to TaskPaper on the Mac (or ToDoPaper on Windows) which cost $30 *ONCE*
Sure, there's upgrades but I can choose whether or not those are worth paying for and can still use the original version I paid for. Same with the company going out of the business or being aquhired. Suddenly, it's all gone. At least with a desktop app, I still have a copy.
Fredy
9/3/2012 10:47 am
I'd like to add two other aspects:
Most books (= end product of writing, in this respect) are written / printed as that "continuous stream", many beginning a new page (or even a new sheet = odd-numbered page) for main chapters only. A tiny fraction of books only does something like "outlining" in the sense of systematic fractionizing content down to the spatial representation: There are SOME books that, e.g., begin each atomized subject with a new double page (even page number, plus the following odd-numbered page), often (then) doing an "executive" paragraph, often printed in a bigger font size, followed by the corresponding "details" - or having the "executive summary" at the end of that double page (and if the details are too long in order to sit on just two pages, they often do 3 such pages, exceptionally, leaving the following odd-numbered page white). I always thought this is a very interesting concept for presenting material to the public, to the reader.
Of course, you can write a book, heavily fractionized with sub-headings, paragraphs, and such, and publish it in the flow style notwithstanding. Many authors do exactly that, hence the incredible amount of such sub-headings of many indentation levels all over all pages - I've seen books with 600 pages but 8 pages of table of "major" (upper-level) content, and then 40 pages of detailed content table - for me, such a concept is "the horror", and that's NOT a "style question" only, since you'll have to admit that even if people might be able to do such an atomization of material in a way making any sense, this leaves completely out any "third dimension", i.e. such myriads of exploded tiniest bits MUST have myriads of cross-references AND possible multiple different ways of "collating them together", of possible / meaningful / necessary (!) alternative ways of clustering them, that such 40-page "detailed content tables" are nothing but a preposterous and misleading if not highly manipulative artifact. So you see this first concept can easily be lead ad absurdum, and in fact, it is, more and frequent, it seems; during these last months, I've seen more of such examples than I've seen in ten years, some years ago.
On the other end of possible structural choices, you'll get French literature in the social sciences field. In fact, as anybody knows who has done some reading in this field, the VERY big majority of French authors present their thoughts in quite a different form as others (English-speaking, Scandinavian, German authors in those same fields) do normally: They (the French) go on for pages and pages, putting in dozens of disparate thoughts, do a literal explosion of different subjects there, and most of the time even without separating things by separate paragraphs, things that have nothing to do with each other, except for minuscule associative origin in the minds of the writers.
You can name this "chaos reading" if you want - this style is the apotheosis, then, of the above-mentioned "Word" style, "continuous style", but totally misused, for depth of arguing it was never invented for, at least in this particular form, leaving out 95 % at least of any "needed" breaks, paragraphs, sub-headings, etc. Some of yours will have read - or put an eye into - Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and so they will know that nobody else, for depth of "findings" in such quantitiy, this "endless flow of putting anything you want together", was taken to even lesser summits coming a little bit close even. Which makes me muse if Proust has taken this, then pre-existing, "art" of mixing up things to new - and never re-atteined afterward - heights, or if it's simply the other way round, with Proust having introduced a completely new (and awful) style, which then has impressed French writers (I'm not speaking of belles lettres here, and Proust himself was a minor novelist, but the greatest essayist of "all" time, or among them) so much that they feel, in such number, obliged to ape the unattainable example (about 10,000 pages or not much less anyway) in their little 200 page products - and I'm not even speaking of avarage sentence length here, or let my just say that in Proust, many a sentence flew over a page, almost a page or even more than a page, and here again, French authors LOVE to try the same, but not as exceedingly as they ape the great master's muddling up 101 different subjects without doing the slightest paragraph break, let alone sub-headings. (If it's Proust worship or just "French style" even before him, check by looking at social sciences text of the 19th Century.) And here you see that the second concept can be led as easily ad absurbum - and is, frequently, in the French culture - as the first one.
Most books (= end product of writing, in this respect) are written / printed as that "continuous stream", many beginning a new page (or even a new sheet = odd-numbered page) for main chapters only. A tiny fraction of books only does something like "outlining" in the sense of systematic fractionizing content down to the spatial representation: There are SOME books that, e.g., begin each atomized subject with a new double page (even page number, plus the following odd-numbered page), often (then) doing an "executive" paragraph, often printed in a bigger font size, followed by the corresponding "details" - or having the "executive summary" at the end of that double page (and if the details are too long in order to sit on just two pages, they often do 3 such pages, exceptionally, leaving the following odd-numbered page white). I always thought this is a very interesting concept for presenting material to the public, to the reader.
Of course, you can write a book, heavily fractionized with sub-headings, paragraphs, and such, and publish it in the flow style notwithstanding. Many authors do exactly that, hence the incredible amount of such sub-headings of many indentation levels all over all pages - I've seen books with 600 pages but 8 pages of table of "major" (upper-level) content, and then 40 pages of detailed content table - for me, such a concept is "the horror", and that's NOT a "style question" only, since you'll have to admit that even if people might be able to do such an atomization of material in a way making any sense, this leaves completely out any "third dimension", i.e. such myriads of exploded tiniest bits MUST have myriads of cross-references AND possible multiple different ways of "collating them together", of possible / meaningful / necessary (!) alternative ways of clustering them, that such 40-page "detailed content tables" are nothing but a preposterous and misleading if not highly manipulative artifact. So you see this first concept can easily be lead ad absurdum, and in fact, it is, more and frequent, it seems; during these last months, I've seen more of such examples than I've seen in ten years, some years ago.
On the other end of possible structural choices, you'll get French literature in the social sciences field. In fact, as anybody knows who has done some reading in this field, the VERY big majority of French authors present their thoughts in quite a different form as others (English-speaking, Scandinavian, German authors in those same fields) do normally: They (the French) go on for pages and pages, putting in dozens of disparate thoughts, do a literal explosion of different subjects there, and most of the time even without separating things by separate paragraphs, things that have nothing to do with each other, except for minuscule associative origin in the minds of the writers.
You can name this "chaos reading" if you want - this style is the apotheosis, then, of the above-mentioned "Word" style, "continuous style", but totally misused, for depth of arguing it was never invented for, at least in this particular form, leaving out 95 % at least of any "needed" breaks, paragraphs, sub-headings, etc. Some of yours will have read - or put an eye into - Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and so they will know that nobody else, for depth of "findings" in such quantitiy, this "endless flow of putting anything you want together", was taken to even lesser summits coming a little bit close even. Which makes me muse if Proust has taken this, then pre-existing, "art" of mixing up things to new - and never re-atteined afterward - heights, or if it's simply the other way round, with Proust having introduced a completely new (and awful) style, which then has impressed French writers (I'm not speaking of belles lettres here, and Proust himself was a minor novelist, but the greatest essayist of "all" time, or among them) so much that they feel, in such number, obliged to ape the unattainable example (about 10,000 pages or not much less anyway) in their little 200 page products - and I'm not even speaking of avarage sentence length here, or let my just say that in Proust, many a sentence flew over a page, almost a page or even more than a page, and here again, French authors LOVE to try the same, but not as exceedingly as they ape the great master's muddling up 101 different subjects without doing the slightest paragraph break, let alone sub-headings. (If it's Proust worship or just "French style" even before him, check by looking at social sciences text of the 19th Century.) And here you see that the second concept can be led as easily ad absurbum - and is, frequently, in the French culture - as the first one.
Stephen Zeoli
9/3/2012 11:15 am
I find it very humorous that the developer claims that WorkFlowy is the first "organizational tool that lets you organize things the way you naturally think by breaking everything down into smaller pieces..." This is such an outlandish and demonstrably false lie that I wonder if the developer was ever a politician.
I tried WorkFlowy last year and found it intriguing, but after a week instead of "wondering how I ever got by without it," I just stopped using it.
If they made a desktop version, I might be tempted.
Steve Z.
I tried WorkFlowy last year and found it intriguing, but after a week instead of "wondering how I ever got by without it," I just stopped using it.
If they made a desktop version, I might be tempted.
Steve Z.
Stephen Zeoli
9/3/2012 11:34 am
As for limiting ourselves with two-pane outliners, I think you may be right. Two pane outliners parse information into sections be design. The "outline" part in one pane is really just for headings, while the information goes in the editor pane. This can be very useful, but is really more of a database model, where each record is a separate item. The single-pane outline can certainly parse information, as is indicated in the WorkFlowy video, but it also feels like a single, integrated document.
I'm not suggesting the two-pane outliner can not be used successfully to created integrated documents -- just see Scrivener -- but that I think you are right, Daly, that it does sometimes psychologically limit us -- or at least it may limit me.
Nice topic!
Steve Z.
I'm not suggesting the two-pane outliner can not be used successfully to created integrated documents -- just see Scrivener -- but that I think you are right, Daly, that it does sometimes psychologically limit us -- or at least it may limit me.
Nice topic!
Steve Z.
Cassius
9/3/2012 12:30 pm
How's this:
Single-pane outliners are best for WRITING.
Two-pane "outliners" are best for Collecting, Categorizing, and Storing information.
Although, I admit that I have used each for the opposite function (particularly GrandView).
Single-pane outliners are best for WRITING.
Two-pane "outliners" are best for Collecting, Categorizing, and Storing information.
Although, I admit that I have used each for the opposite function (particularly GrandView).
Dr Andus
9/3/2012 1:19 pm
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
This is a classical mistake of cybernetics, whereby people who developed the computer thought they were modelling human thought, when in fact they have instrumentalised a very unnatural way of thinking, which in turn has been used as a model for human thought. I would like to see that person who thinks in a hierarchical folder structure and saves individual thoughts into separately labelled compartments in his or her brain, ready to be retrieved by global searches...
I find it very humorous that the developer claims that WorkFlowy is the first
"organizational tool that lets you organize things the way you naturally think by
breaking everything down into smaller pieces..." This is such an outlandish and
demonstrably false lie that I wonder if the developer was ever a politician.
This is a classical mistake of cybernetics, whereby people who developed the computer thought they were modelling human thought, when in fact they have instrumentalised a very unnatural way of thinking, which in turn has been used as a model for human thought. I would like to see that person who thinks in a hierarchical folder structure and saves individual thoughts into separately labelled compartments in his or her brain, ready to be retrieved by global searches...
Fredy
9/3/2012 4:07 pm
Specifics would be welcome, Steve. We know your stance, but it would help us non-inliner guys if you shared your "limiting" experiences with "our" stuff.
Totally false dichotomy, Cassius, which I know has been repeated endlessly in various fori, but as we know, endless repetition of false facts don't get them true. Some people really set up rather incredible "workflow" settings, in order to separate "external" material from their own writing, when in fact, there's that third category, self-produced intermediate "material", by design... or, most of the time, by discarding stuff from what was originally meant as output. So all this only "enhances chaos, all the more so since with all that "third party" material, you'll do extensive notes, etc. I very well know the need for clear distinction of third party stuff and your own stuff, among other reasons for legal reasons, and I'd certainly be willing to discuss technical means for assuring this separation, but as said, trying to have two distinct tools for that appears to be a little bit naïve since there is much too entanglement between the two, in practical work, for any such "total" separation not becoming a serious obstacle to your production very soon.
You're perfectly right, Doctorandus, and this makes the attraction, at first sight, of tools that pretend to support or even promote "associative thinking", like TheBrain, PersonalBrain or whatever they call it at any given moment. To clarify, when I tout fractionizing and tout outliners, and more so, relegating that fractionizing to the tree, I very well speak of "artificial", i.e. not-thinking-like: I'm speaking of getting "law and order" into your previous associative thinking, and I say, look upon these endless French essays in order to have fine examples how reading is hampered when authors do NOT bother to sectionalize their thoughts after thinking, for the recipients' sake.
So, nobody will get easy answers when discussing thinking, writing and reading, and if he thinks he's got an easy answer even to partly aspects, chances are he's mistaken even for that part. Very sorry that some things are MUCH more complicated than most people would like them to be. There's a good term that's come totally out of fashion, it's prolegomena. Greater thinkers than we are KNEW, in their time, that they only could get beginnings of first elements of analysis, with hard thinking - whilst many little thinkers today think, on the contrary, that with easy thinking they'd get to ultimate depths. There's an ancient saying, people telling the truth need a fast horse. In English: People don't like to be reminded that their easy findings ain't that profound, let alone final. Sorry for that.
Totally false dichotomy, Cassius, which I know has been repeated endlessly in various fori, but as we know, endless repetition of false facts don't get them true. Some people really set up rather incredible "workflow" settings, in order to separate "external" material from their own writing, when in fact, there's that third category, self-produced intermediate "material", by design... or, most of the time, by discarding stuff from what was originally meant as output. So all this only "enhances chaos, all the more so since with all that "third party" material, you'll do extensive notes, etc. I very well know the need for clear distinction of third party stuff and your own stuff, among other reasons for legal reasons, and I'd certainly be willing to discuss technical means for assuring this separation, but as said, trying to have two distinct tools for that appears to be a little bit naïve since there is much too entanglement between the two, in practical work, for any such "total" separation not becoming a serious obstacle to your production very soon.
You're perfectly right, Doctorandus, and this makes the attraction, at first sight, of tools that pretend to support or even promote "associative thinking", like TheBrain, PersonalBrain or whatever they call it at any given moment. To clarify, when I tout fractionizing and tout outliners, and more so, relegating that fractionizing to the tree, I very well speak of "artificial", i.e. not-thinking-like: I'm speaking of getting "law and order" into your previous associative thinking, and I say, look upon these endless French essays in order to have fine examples how reading is hampered when authors do NOT bother to sectionalize their thoughts after thinking, for the recipients' sake.
So, nobody will get easy answers when discussing thinking, writing and reading, and if he thinks he's got an easy answer even to partly aspects, chances are he's mistaken even for that part. Very sorry that some things are MUCH more complicated than most people would like them to be. There's a good term that's come totally out of fashion, it's prolegomena. Greater thinkers than we are KNEW, in their time, that they only could get beginnings of first elements of analysis, with hard thinking - whilst many little thinkers today think, on the contrary, that with easy thinking they'd get to ultimate depths. There's an ancient saying, people telling the truth need a fast horse. In English: People don't like to be reminded that their easy findings ain't that profound, let alone final. Sorry for that.
Stephen Zeoli
9/3/2012 6:19 pm
Fredy wrote:
Specifics would be welcome, Steve. We know your stance, but it would help us
non-inliner guys if you shared your "limiting" experiences with "our"
stuff.
I'm not sure how I can share a limiting experience with what you call "our" stuff, since I have no experience with your stuff or anyone's by my own.
However, if you want me to explain further what I mean, here goes: A single-pane outliner forces you to focus on structure and logic; whereas with a two-pane outliner your focus can shift from structure to content and back again very easily. A single-pane outliner lends itself to focus on one project -- that is, you should create a new outline for each project. A two-pane outliner is more of a filing cabinet, a collection of documents which may or may not be related and may or may not have a logical flow. The "limiting" aspect is that the two-pane outliner may not facilitate the same logical thought process that a single-pane outliner promotes.
SZ
George Entenman
9/4/2012 3:58 am
Fredy wrote:
First, you will like this video of Noam Chomsky criticizing the French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTE_bPh7M I agree with most of it.
I agree that French academic style can be awful. Unfortunately, it influenced the areas of US academia that like "theory". But I'm not sure I agree that the problem with their writing has much to do with organization of paragraphs and pages. I think it has more to do with fuzzy thinking (viz Chomsky) and a lack of interest in explaining anything: everyone wants to start their books and articles "in the middle of the conversation", i.e., without any kind of introduction for anyone who is not immersed in the field.
For the sake of anyone here who might be thinking of reading Proust, let me say that you are mistaken in assuming that Proust is not a magnificent writer. "Rememberance of Time Past" is a highly structured work that holds together well. There are problem areas caused by the way he wrote and revised, requiring other people to piece together thousands of pieces of paper in the right order, etc, but the final work, especially the current Tadié edition, is magnificent and coherent.
I don't know if the following sentence is meant as a kind of parody of a Proustian French sentence, but it makes little sense to me. Proust's style, while difficult to follow, is unsurpassed. I recommend looking at the appendices of Joshua Landy's book on Proust ("Philosophy as Fiction"), where he turns some of Proust's sentences into outline form and then explains what he sees in them. Each sentence is like a little poem, especially in French.
On the other end of possible structural choices, you'll get
French literature in the social sciences field. In fact, as anybody knows who has done
some reading in this field, the VERY big majority of French authors present their
thoughts in quite a different form as others (English-speaking, Scandinavian,
German authors in those same fields) do normally: They (the French) go on for pages and
pages, putting in dozens of disparate thoughts, do a literal explosion of different
subjects there, and most of the time even without separating things by separate
paragraphs, things that have nothing to do with each other, except for minuscule
associative origin in the minds of the writers.
First, you will like this video of Noam Chomsky criticizing the French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTE_bPh7M I agree with most of it.
I agree that French academic style can be awful. Unfortunately, it influenced the areas of US academia that like "theory". But I'm not sure I agree that the problem with their writing has much to do with organization of paragraphs and pages. I think it has more to do with fuzzy thinking (viz Chomsky) and a lack of interest in explaining anything: everyone wants to start their books and articles "in the middle of the conversation", i.e., without any kind of introduction for anyone who is not immersed in the field.
... Some of yours will have read - or put an eye into -
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and so they will know that nobody else, for depth
of "findings" in such quantitiy, this "endless flow of putting anything you want
together", was taken to even lesser summits coming a little bit close even.
For the sake of anyone here who might be thinking of reading Proust, let me say that you are mistaken in assuming that Proust is not a magnificent writer. "Rememberance of Time Past" is a highly structured work that holds together well. There are problem areas caused by the way he wrote and revised, requiring other people to piece together thousands of pieces of paper in the right order, etc, but the final work, especially the current Tadié edition, is magnificent and coherent.
I don't know if the following sentence is meant as a kind of parody of a Proustian French sentence, but it makes little sense to me. Proust's style, while difficult to follow, is unsurpassed. I recommend looking at the appendices of Joshua Landy's book on Proust ("Philosophy as Fiction"), where he turns some of Proust's sentences into outline form and then explains what he sees in them. Each sentence is like a little poem, especially in French.
Which
makes me muse if Proust has taken this, then pre-existing, "art" of mixing up things to
new - and never re-atteined afterward - heights, or if it's simply the other way round,
with Proust having introduced a completely new (and awful) style, which then has
impressed French writers (I'm not speaking of belles lettres here, and Proust
himself was a minor novelist, but the greatest essayist of "all" time, or among them)
so much that they feel, in such number, obliged to ape the unattainable example (about
10,000 pages or not much less anyway) in their little 200 page products - and I'm not
even speaking of avarage sentence length here, or let my just say that in Proust, many a
sentence flew over a page, almost a page or even more than a page, and here again, French
authors LOVE to try the same, but not as exceedingly as they ape the great master's
muddling up 101 different subjects without doing the slightest paragraph break, let
alone sub-headings.
(If it's Proust worship or just "French style" even before him,
check by looking at social sciences text of the 19th Century.) And here you see that the
second concept can be led as easily ad absurbum - and is, frequently, in the French
culture - as the first one.
Fredy
9/5/2012 12:02 am
George, the first part of your interjection is interesting; I hadn't been aware that this "French social sciences style" has reached the U.S. As for the second part, I see you like Proust a lot, as a novelist, and have knowledge there that go beyond reading him and reading Painter's bio (which is rather old now as we know), which is my restricted knowledge of "Proustiana". My point was, this unstoppable associative thinking in belles lettres seems to have begun with Proust, and it seems he never was topped since, and so it would be interesting to know if French théoréticiens ape him, or if Proust got this style from somebody else; a theory that Proust invented this, AND that French writers do the same now for totally different reasons, doesn't really convince me since the Proust way is too particular for such a connection - continuity?! - to be inexistant.
I concede that for these developments on all sorts of things, Proust is one of the very, very big writers; it would be foolish to deny this. On the other hand, exactly this makes him, as a novelist, more or less "unreadable", i.e. any "action", if there is any, is effilochée, broken down, defibered / defiberized, disintegrated, torn apart, chopped up.
So, this is my personal reading experience, your experience varies. Proust is best-selling. Proust's works are, among all these standard canonical books any bourgeois or "intellectual" or gauchecaviar French owns, the second-least read, right after bound encyclopedias -
and there are TWO reasons for it:
- As a novelist, Proust really and seriously thinks that his reader will support all this, endless devastating of the fil narrateur, for the benefit of his deep (but very often irrelevant) thoughts; unfortunately, people are not ready to submit to illusion wrecking at this point, and so, after the first two tomes (édition de poche) at the latest, most would-be Proust readers will have given up - people like to read good novels, but then, not une histoire saccagée.
- As an essayist, Proust is splendid, as said, but here, we've got a multiple accessibility problem: Without third party reference material - or endless lists of handwritten notes - you'll never find again this incredible thought of his on that subject, nor that other so appropriate description of the human condition, since you don't get even back to any marking pole which for lesser writers would be some kind of action, at least the page before or the page after - no, with Proust, you'll get 5 or 6 pages of such deep thinking in a row, and even before or after, there is no action of any importance you might remember; this for the macro search; as for the micro search, without any paragraph distinction over 20, 200 or 2,000 lines (I'm exaggerating, but not much), either you learn Proust by heart, or you give up. (Would be a wunderful subject for putting it into a database, but the intermediate-final versions coming out regularly, in order to uphold Gallimard's rights, who would like to have electronic access to éditions bâclées and outdated since more than half a century? Non-cognoscienti here must know that Proust literally wrote up to his dernier soupir (to the last gasp), and his faithful servant and other good-willing people had their say in the rearrangement, etc. of his innumerable sheets of paper.)
This learning Proust by heart, this Proust reading some three other reference books at hand, some people do this; it's a joy for them to "get it straight" (thousands of places and acting persons, millions of cross-references (I'm exaggerating again, or am I?), all this ask for a very robust database), just as it is for others to do big crosswords in just minutes.
This being said, yes, George, on almost every page, there are tournures (figures of speech) that make you bouche bée - your mouth standing wide open: wow, and wow, and wow again - and then, on clapping shut, what was it encore, and what encore?
That's Proust. A genius. And five minutes later, you don't know anymore what he had been speaking of (madeleines don't count). That's why most people though, including most people who own their Proust, prefer lesser writers, for more pleasant and durable reading.
I concede that for these developments on all sorts of things, Proust is one of the very, very big writers; it would be foolish to deny this. On the other hand, exactly this makes him, as a novelist, more or less "unreadable", i.e. any "action", if there is any, is effilochée, broken down, defibered / defiberized, disintegrated, torn apart, chopped up.
So, this is my personal reading experience, your experience varies. Proust is best-selling. Proust's works are, among all these standard canonical books any bourgeois or "intellectual" or gauchecaviar French owns, the second-least read, right after bound encyclopedias -
and there are TWO reasons for it:
- As a novelist, Proust really and seriously thinks that his reader will support all this, endless devastating of the fil narrateur, for the benefit of his deep (but very often irrelevant) thoughts; unfortunately, people are not ready to submit to illusion wrecking at this point, and so, after the first two tomes (édition de poche) at the latest, most would-be Proust readers will have given up - people like to read good novels, but then, not une histoire saccagée.
- As an essayist, Proust is splendid, as said, but here, we've got a multiple accessibility problem: Without third party reference material - or endless lists of handwritten notes - you'll never find again this incredible thought of his on that subject, nor that other so appropriate description of the human condition, since you don't get even back to any marking pole which for lesser writers would be some kind of action, at least the page before or the page after - no, with Proust, you'll get 5 or 6 pages of such deep thinking in a row, and even before or after, there is no action of any importance you might remember; this for the macro search; as for the micro search, without any paragraph distinction over 20, 200 or 2,000 lines (I'm exaggerating, but not much), either you learn Proust by heart, or you give up. (Would be a wunderful subject for putting it into a database, but the intermediate-final versions coming out regularly, in order to uphold Gallimard's rights, who would like to have electronic access to éditions bâclées and outdated since more than half a century? Non-cognoscienti here must know that Proust literally wrote up to his dernier soupir (to the last gasp), and his faithful servant and other good-willing people had their say in the rearrangement, etc. of his innumerable sheets of paper.)
This learning Proust by heart, this Proust reading some three other reference books at hand, some people do this; it's a joy for them to "get it straight" (thousands of places and acting persons, millions of cross-references (I'm exaggerating again, or am I?), all this ask for a very robust database), just as it is for others to do big crosswords in just minutes.
This being said, yes, George, on almost every page, there are tournures (figures of speech) that make you bouche bée - your mouth standing wide open: wow, and wow, and wow again - and then, on clapping shut, what was it encore, and what encore?
That's Proust. A genius. And five minutes later, you don't know anymore what he had been speaking of (madeleines don't count). That's why most people though, including most people who own their Proust, prefer lesser writers, for more pleasant and durable reading.
Foolness
9/5/2012 8:38 pm
This is inaccurate.
I'm not a fan of workflowy myself but saying workflowy is purely an outliner would be akin to saying PersonalBrain and MindManager are the same.
In fact, workflowy's weakest features are it's in-line notes and outline. A dedicated forum like this should be much keen to the nuances of services like this.
Trying reorganizing Workflowy's outline and you'll be met with an annoying mouse click drag that belies the ease of the keyboards for the rest of the service. Trying creating sub-trees and you'll be forced to play tab as a branch line is not a pure line but is a slave to the previous branch. The notes feature is also very confused. They did it well enough that now only the first line of a note is showing but they also annoyed many users who want full notes shown but if you allow that, mass note takers are punished because the notes eat up a whole lot of space.
Workflowy's uniqueness lies in it being a foldable outliner, fast speed and pure text export mixed with it's auto-detecting and auto-converting of text tags into clickable tags.
What this means is that while Checkvist can also be sub-clicked, Workflowy smoothly transitions into a sub-branch at a touch of a button in such a way that it's more comparable to TiddlyWiki than Checkvist despite the initial similarity.
The text tag conversations is two fold. Someone mentioned a software on the Mac. Well that's the thing. It's only on a Mac. Fail to back up that software or switch to another OS then it's not cross platform.
Workflowy on the other hand has a triple backup feature. The web service. The e-mail mentioning the history. Finally any basic text editor where you paste the entire outliner into a basic text editor/barebones Windows Notepad.
Since it's basically a text editor on the web, the formatting is exactly as it looks as you typed it in the web service except when exporting in formatted form. It's not an auto-export but by far it has one of the simplest ctrl + c export methods among free services including non-cloud services.
The other power is the quick search. The search is much much faster than even gmail making it one of the fastest web service for filtering. This means that setting aside a fancy calendar ui, typing March on the search, will outpace finding your appointment on either GCal, Coolendar or Gmail. It's really all in the tags.
Is it better than dedicated to-do lists? No. But speed per speed, it scales better than something like RTM or Evernote who also rely on tagging systems to filter through dates, priorities, etc.
It's really like combining a barebones plain txt editor with PersonalBrain and last I checked, PersonalBrain is not essentially a mind map software either.
I'm not a fan of workflowy myself but saying workflowy is purely an outliner would be akin to saying PersonalBrain and MindManager are the same.
In fact, workflowy's weakest features are it's in-line notes and outline. A dedicated forum like this should be much keen to the nuances of services like this.
Trying reorganizing Workflowy's outline and you'll be met with an annoying mouse click drag that belies the ease of the keyboards for the rest of the service. Trying creating sub-trees and you'll be forced to play tab as a branch line is not a pure line but is a slave to the previous branch. The notes feature is also very confused. They did it well enough that now only the first line of a note is showing but they also annoyed many users who want full notes shown but if you allow that, mass note takers are punished because the notes eat up a whole lot of space.
Workflowy's uniqueness lies in it being a foldable outliner, fast speed and pure text export mixed with it's auto-detecting and auto-converting of text tags into clickable tags.
What this means is that while Checkvist can also be sub-clicked, Workflowy smoothly transitions into a sub-branch at a touch of a button in such a way that it's more comparable to TiddlyWiki than Checkvist despite the initial similarity.
The text tag conversations is two fold. Someone mentioned a software on the Mac. Well that's the thing. It's only on a Mac. Fail to back up that software or switch to another OS then it's not cross platform.
Workflowy on the other hand has a triple backup feature. The web service. The e-mail mentioning the history. Finally any basic text editor where you paste the entire outliner into a basic text editor/barebones Windows Notepad.
Since it's basically a text editor on the web, the formatting is exactly as it looks as you typed it in the web service except when exporting in formatted form. It's not an auto-export but by far it has one of the simplest ctrl + c export methods among free services including non-cloud services.
The other power is the quick search. The search is much much faster than even gmail making it one of the fastest web service for filtering. This means that setting aside a fancy calendar ui, typing March on the search, will outpace finding your appointment on either GCal, Coolendar or Gmail. It's really all in the tags.
Is it better than dedicated to-do lists? No. But speed per speed, it scales better than something like RTM or Evernote who also rely on tagging systems to filter through dates, priorities, etc.
It's really like combining a barebones plain txt editor with PersonalBrain and last I checked, PersonalBrain is not essentially a mind map software either.