Bullets and Conjunctions

2019-04-07 - I’m curious about the relationship between itemization and conjunction.

• It was brought up at the ScrapboxDrinkup.

  • Two cases of using Scrapbox to teach writing to students
    • Teaching against the subjunctive is backwards.
      • Don’t use the subjunctive ⇔ “Supplement the subjunctive.”
  • Don’t use the subjunctive.”
    • Training to compose in a way that makes sense without
    • The word “therefore” is valuable.
      • There are some places where it is absolutely necessary.
      • Use only where absolutely necessary.
    • (Additional Hearing)
      • The sentences that students produce during this instructional process require a specific structure
        • three-stage legal argument
  • Supplement the conjunction.”
    • Some students can write bullet points but cannot put them in writing
      • If the teacher reviews at the bullet point stage, it will appear that they understand it properly.
        • Teachers unconsciously fill in bulleted blanks and read them.
        • Students don’t always blank out “what they know and don’t need to write”.
        • Sometimes there’s a blank space for “we don’t know.”
    • That’s why I’m going to make you write the conjunction explicitly.
      • Make the relationship between bulleted items explicit.
        • Is it an example?
        • Is it a counterexample?
      • By clarifying how the two bulleted items connect, you can notice if there is a blank space there
    • Reading bullet points fast.
      • But that assumes that the person is able to fill in the blanks and read
      • Not appropriate for personnel in the education process
      • If you read fast, you’ll think you’re right.
      • Slowing down the reading speed is useful for critical reading

• Subsequent Discussions

  • There is an opinion that conjunctions are not used very often in engineering groups.
  • Maybe the frequency of conjunctions changes between situations of “explaining one’s point of view on a matter for which there is no correct answer” and “communicating a fact.”
  • If it is agreed in advance that it is a communication of facts, then “critical reading” is not necessary and time is lost. On the other hand, when it is a communication of interpretation, it must be read critically or it will be “taken for granted.
  • In a situation where we are trying to train the ability to read critically, it is not unnatural for a different manner to emerge than the manner in which facts are shared efficiently.
  • On the other hand, even engineers who usually have informational conversations sometimes have unanswerable discussions. For example, how the design should be done. If someone says, “This is the way it should be,” the discussion tends to go down the same path. - Linux is utilitarian - Factual and action-oriented
    • Possibility that the frequency of conjunction appearing in itemization is some kind of measure.

• There are two trainings.

  • Training to have the students supplement the conjunctions because they are not properly developing the argument with bullet points.
  • Training to make them cut down on conjunctions because they rely on conjunctions to develop their arguments and are not structured.

• If a bullet point begins with a conjunction, it prevents outliner-like vertical movement.

  • Conjunctions connect multiple items and fix relationships between them.
  • So for those who are having trouble writing one-dimensional sentences with a twisted argument and don’t know how to improve it, it can be beneficial to “think about the structure” by turning the chunks of information in the written text into individual elements of a bullet list, removing the conjunctions, and allowing them to move freely.
  • Conversely, for those who are not able to list chunks of information in bulleted lists and turn them into one-dimensional sentences, it is beneficial to “think about the flow” of how to connect these fragments.
  • At this stage, it will be beneficial to explicitly supplement the conjunctions after creating the structure with bullet points.

↑upThis itself is a later bulleted version of “One-dimensional text” that I suddenly thought of and wrote on Facebook. You can see that there are conjunctions and the order is not interchangeable.

Here’s a flat bulleted list: (associative: composter)

• Conjunctions at the beginning of bullet points prevent outliner-like vertical movement.
• Conjunctions connect multiple items and fix relationships between them.
• When the conjunction is removed, the state is free to move.
• One-dimensional sentences with a twisted argument
• Think about the composition
• Make the chunks of information in the written text move with each element of the bulleted list.
• Some are unable to turn a piece of information into a one-dimensional sentence.
• Bulleted list of chunks of information
• What to do after creating a structure with bullet points
• How do we connect the fragments?
• Consider the flow
• Explicitly supplement bullet points with conjunctions

This process is nothing but label making of KJ method from my point of view.

• Sticky notes for the KJ method are made with “moving” in mind.
• Bullet points, structuring sentences in an outliner is equivalent to [KJ method with tree constraints

In response to the opinion, “Isn’t removing the subjunctive supposed to make it easier to move?” In response to the opinion, “It is decided to compose in the legal three paragraphs, so we don’t move them up and down so much to compose.

A search for “bullet points and conjunctions” unearthed Kinta Nakayama’s comments on Mach New Book.

• In the age of e-books, I’m beginning to think that bullet points are no longer enough. Bullet points can be written in a mach.

• The form of writing is inevitably serialized and does not handle parallel concepts well.

• If the reader can implicitly compensate for the conjunction, the bullet points are sufficient to convey the meaning.

  • Conditions for a bulleted e-book to be viable

    • Readers are sufficiently educated and knowledgeable to complement the conjunctions.

    • I don’t want to read the text, I want to read the author’s thought dump.

  • If the goal is to reach 1,000 people with an e-book, bullet points are sufficient.

  • Normal text if you want to reach an unspecified number of 5,000 or more people (equivalent to the first edition of a technical book).

• https://twitter.com/tokoroten/status/991084472870223874

---

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/箇条書きと接続詞 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.