Yeah, this seems important to think about. I’m not sure if it actually changes my sense of whether that’s bad, or not.
If I’m writing a bullet list and using the “first chunk is bold, rest of paragraph is not” technique, then it definitely matters that the rest of the paragraph actually be optional. Maybe if it’s actually optional, it should be a strong signal that I should just trim it out completely? Dunno.
In the case of this post, do you think you’d have preferred to read the entire text (i.e. if I hadn’t bolded anything)? If I had just only included the bold parts in the first place would that have been better?
Maybe if it’s actually optional, it should be a strong signal that I should just trim it out completely?
In this “Optional” means “some readers don’t have to read this, while others do”. For any given reader there should be a fact of the matter as to whether they should read nested details and they should know what it is.
Would it help to label nested sections with their type? Stuff like “supporting argument”, “clarification”, “related parenthetical information”
A little hard to say, but I think that I would have preferred reading the whole post, since the non-bold points did add some relevant detail that helped me evaluate your claims (ironically, probably the most valuable-feeling additional detail was in the “Prose often adds unnecessary cruft”bullet, where the 2x-3x was a nicely specific quantification and I would otherwise have been unsure exactly how much cruft you were thinking of).
Yeah, this seems important to think about. I’m not sure if it actually changes my sense of whether that’s bad, or not.
If I’m writing a bullet list and using the “first chunk is bold, rest of paragraph is not” technique, then it definitely matters that the rest of the paragraph actually be optional. Maybe if it’s actually optional, it should be a strong signal that I should just trim it out completely? Dunno.
In the case of this post, do you think you’d have preferred to read the entire text (i.e. if I hadn’t bolded anything)? If I had just only included the bold parts in the first place would that have been better?
In this “Optional” means “some readers don’t have to read this, while others do”. For any given reader there should be a fact of the matter as to whether they should read nested details and they should know what it is.
Would it help to label nested sections with their type? Stuff like “supporting argument”, “clarification”, “related parenthetical information”
A little hard to say, but I think that I would have preferred reading the whole post, since the non-bold points did add some relevant detail that helped me evaluate your claims (ironically, probably the most valuable-feeling additional detail was in the “Prose often adds unnecessary cruft” bullet, where the 2x-3x was a nicely specific quantification and I would otherwise have been unsure exactly how much cruft you were thinking of).