The modern formatting addiction in writing
EXHIBIT A
Here is some text. It is made out of words.
Here is a subsection
And here are some bullet-points:
- Here is one.
- Here is another.
Hierarchy
- Here is a numbered list.
- And now:
- Look at this.
- Bullets inside a number inside a section inside a section.
- What a time to be alive.
Pictures
The text can also contain pictures for you to look at with your eyes¹.
¹ There can also be footnotes; have an eye emoji: 👀
Quotes
The text can also include quotes.
- Actually, let’s do one inside of a list.
- A deeply nested list.
- This is going to be awesome.
The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.
- Nailed it.
- This is going to be awesome.
- A deeply nested list.
Back up
Wait a second.
- Are we currently in a section or subsection or a subsubsection?
- What parent section encloses this one?
- Where are we in the hierarchy?
- What are we doing?
EXHIBIT B
This is also text. It is also made out of words. But instead of jerky fragments, these words are organized into sentences, like normal human language.
Do you see how relaxing this is? After the torment you suffered above, isn’t it nice to have words that come in a simple linear order? And isn’t it nice that you just have to read the words, and not worry about how they fit into some convoluted implied knowledge taxonomy?
These sentences are themselves organized into paragraphs. The first sentence of each paragraph is a sort of summary. So if you want to skim, you can do that. But you don’t have to skim. This text also has italics and parentheses and whatnot. But not too much. (Just a little.)
Why I bring this up
Thanks for enduring that. My purpose was to illustrate a mystery. Namely, why do so many people today seem to write more like Exhibit A than Exhibit B?
People sometimes give me something they wrote and ask for comments. Half the time, my reaction is Good god, why is 70% of this section titles and bullet points?
This always gives me a strange feeling. It’s like all the formatting is based on some ontology. And that ontology is what I really need to understand. But it’s never actually explained. Instead, I guess I’m supposed to figure it out as things jerk between different topics? It’s disorienting, like a movie that cuts between different scenes every three seconds.
But maybe that’s just my opinion? Maybe, but sometimes I’ll ask people who write like this to show me some writing they admire. And inevitably, its’s not 70% formatting, but mostly paragraphs and normal human language. So I feel that people who write this way are violating the central tenet of making stuff, which is to make something you would actually like.
So then why write like that? Why do I, despite my griping, often find myself writing like that? I’ve wondered this for years. But I told myself that I was right and that too much formatting is bad.
But now—have you heard?—now we have this technology where computers can write stuff. And guess what? When they do that, they also use an insane amount of formatting.
That’s weird. I figured people were addicted to formatting because they’re noobs that don’t know any better. But AIs have been optimized to make human raters happy. And that led to a similar addiction. Why?
1. Maybe formatting is good
The obvious explanation is that formatting is good. People love reading stuff that’s all formatting. We should all be formatting-maxxing.
There’s something to this. But it can’t really be right, because popular human writers use formatting in moderation. So formatting can’t be that good.
2. Maybe formatting is good in certain contexts
Even before AI, everyone did agree that formatting was great in one context: Search-engine optimized content slop. Back in 2018, if you searched for anything, you’d find pages brimming with section titles and bullet points.
Why? Well, when I type “why human gastric juice more acidic than other animals”, I’m not really looking for something to read. I just want to skim an overview of the main theories. I’ve experimented with asking AIs to give the same information in various styles, and I reluctantly concede that the formatting helps.
But that’s not reading. Say you’ve written a ten-thousand word manifesto on human-eco-social species enhancement. If I actually care about what you think, I maintain that it’s better in paragraphs, because reading ten thousand words with endless formatting would be excruciating. This is why everyone who writes long-form essays that people actually read uses normal paragraphs.
So our mystery is still alive. Most writers aspire not to write content slop, but meaningful stuff other people care about. Often, when people show me formatting-maxxed essays, I’ll complain and they’ll rewrite it with less formatting and agree that the new version is better. So why use so much formatting even when it’s bad?
3. Maybe quality is hard to verify
There’s something odd about that previous example. When I search for “why human gastric juice more acidic than other animals” into a computer, why am I not looking for something to “read”? After all, I like reading. If one of my favorite bloggers wrote an essay on the mystery of human gastric juice, I would devour it.
So if I want a good essay, why don’t I look for one? I guess it’s because I instinctively rate my odds of finding one on any random topic as quite low.
There’s something here related to Gresham’s law: A format-maxxed essay might be sort of crap, but at least I can ascertain its crap level quickly. A “real” essay could be great, but I’d have to invest a lot of time before I can know if that time was worth investing. So I—regretfully—mostly only read “real” essays when I have some signal that they’re good. If everyone behaves the way I do, I guess people will respond to their incentives and write with lots of formatting.
Similarly, if a (current) AI tried to write a “real” essay, I probably wouldn’t read it, because I wouldn’t trust that it was good. Perhaps that explains why they don’t.
Aside: If this is right, then it predicts that as AIs advance, they should become less formatting-crazy. The better they are, the more we’ll trust them.
4. Maybe chain-of-thought works well in format world
Some people can think of an idea, organize their thoughts, and then write them down, tidy and sparkling. I am not one of those people. If I mentally organize my ideas and go to write them down, I soon learn that my ideas were not in fact organized. Usually, they’re hardly even ideas and more a slurry of confused psychic debris.
The way I write is that I make an outline. Or, rather, I try to make an outline. But then I realize the structure is off, so I start over. After a few cycles, I give up and just write the first section. After revising it eight times, I’ll try (and fail) to make an outline for the rest of the post. This continues—with occasional interludes where I reorganize everything—until I can’t take it anymore and publish.
I don’t recommend it. My point is just that blathering out a bunch of text is a good way to think. And when blathering, formatting seems to help. Partly, I think that’s because formatting allows you to experiment with structure without worrying about the details. And partly I think that’s because formatting makes it easier to get down details without worrying about the bigger picture.
So maybe that’s one source of our formatting addiction? We blather in formatting, but don’t put in the work to clarify things?
Oddly, some claim that something similar is true for AI: If you tune them to write with lots of formatting, that doesn’t just change how the content looks, but also improves accuracy. The idea is that as the AI looks at what it’s written so far, formatting helps it stay focused on the most important things. Supposedly.
Maybe that’s true. But we have “reasoning” AIs now, that blather for a while before producing a final output. If they wanted, they could format-maxx while thinking and output paragraphs at the end. But they don’t. So while this explanation might work for people, I don’t buy it for AI.
5. Maybe formatting is a bluff
Finally, a conspiracy theory. Sometimes when I try to fight through a format-maxxed essay, it seems like all the formatting speaks to me. It says: “This is a nonlinear web of ideas. I’m giving you the pieces. If you pay attention, you should see how they fit together. Sadly, the world isn’t a simple narrative I can spoon-feed to you. So this is the best I can do.”
I think this is a bluff. And it’s a good one, because it’s based in truth. The world is not a narrative. Narratives are lies we tell ourselves to try to cope with the swirl of complexity that is reality. All true!
Editor's note: At this point, the author became agitated and wrote and then deleted a bunch of bullet points. In the interest of transparency, these are collected here. (Click to expand.)
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However, narratives are all we’ve got. If you want to understand something with your tiny little brain, you don’t really have a lot of other options.
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The thing about writing that’s 70% formatting is that it’s very easy to delude yourself that there’s a set of clear ideas underneath all of them.
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Imagine an LLM that has an amazing contextual ability to find related ideas to anything that’s brought up, but isn’t all that great at synthesizing them into a coherent whole. If that LLM were to try to write beautiful paragraphs, those paragraphs might appear sort of obviously incoherent. However, if that LLM were to construct a lot of bullet points, it might appear much more useful, and in fact, actually be much more useful.
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Imagine you’re an AI. You have an amazing recall of most of human knowledge ever created, but you have a mediocre ability to synthesize that into novel theories or to work out the bugs in those theories. Now, if someone asks you a question and you try to write a beautiful narrative and respond to them, that narrative might appear to be sort of obviously incoherent and confusing, and your raters might say, bad AI, stop that. Whereas, if you were to output a ton of bullet points, without even necessarily trying to cohere them into a whole, your writers might say, good.
But imagine you’re an AI. You’re being trained to respond in ways that make human raters happy. You can remember most knowledge ever created, but you’re so-so at synthesizing it into new ideas. If someone asks you a question and you try to write a beautiful narrative, your response might look like confusing babbling, meaning your raters say, “Bad AI. Stop that.” Whereas if you output a bunch of section titles and bullet points, raters might say, “This seems OK.” So you’ll start doing the latter.
That’s not bad. Arguably, you (you’re still an AI) are responding in the way that’s most useful, given your capabilities. But you are also responding in a way that gives a misleading impression that you’ve figured out how everything fits together, even if you haven’t.
I suspect something similar happens with humans. Say you have a bunch of ideas, but you haven’t yet really boiled them down to your core message. If you write paragraphs, people will probably view them as confused babbling. Whereas if you write with lots of formatting, people might still be at least somewhat positive. Just like AIs, we all respond to our rewards.
More importantly, if you’ve written something that’s 70% formatting, it’s easy to delude yourself that there’s a clear set of ideas underneath, even when there isn’t.
The good news is that if you put in the effort, you can write better paragraphs than AI (for now). The act of creating a narrative forces you to confront contradictions that are invisible in format-world. So even if you want to write with 70% formatting, consider forcing yourself to write in paragraphs first.
Summary
Theory: Both people and AIs are addicted to formatting because:
- Formatting is good.
- Sometimes.
- Especially if you don’t trust the author.
- On the internet, most people probably don’t trust you.
- It’s harder to see that something has problems when it’s written in all-formatting.
- It’s easier to blather out a bunch of formatting than to write lucid paragraphs.
- This is good at some stages, because it’s easy.
- But forcing yourself to actually write a narrative is also good, because it’s hard.
So:
- First write with lots of formatting.
- Then figure out how to remove it.
- Then put it back, if you want.
P.S.
How does the optimal amount of formatting vary in the length of a piece of writing? I suspect it’s like this:
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