The Compact Structure of These Posts

©Fernando Caracena 26 October 2017

I was very impressed a long time ago by the structure of a small encyclopedia, which was entirely contained in a handy, little paper back book. A small book cannot contain very much information, at least not the way that books are usually organized. What made this little book really handy was that it was densely crossed referenced. Nothing was repeated. Individual articles were short and lacking in details; but, the missing details were referenced in other articles of the little book. Perhaps, the articles in this mini encyclopedia required a special type of reader that resonated with how my own mind works.

Later, I was excited to find the hyperlink structure in HTML programming, which allowed one to write a script that could reference any article on the Internet and even, on one's own hard drive.  I realized then that hyperlinking made it possible to write complete articles, not lacking in details, but which referred to those details contained in articles that already exist and can be referenced instantly through the Internet. In the old style publications, this could be possible only if the reader sat in a very good library and had a staff of very able assistants who would rapidly fetch the articles cited from the stacks.

In writing posts for this blog, I have used the strategy of writing with hyperlinks for details. I have realized that by doing this, the value of the writing is not in bringing forth a mass of details and descriptions, but simply acting as a guide for the reader by directing that person's attention to what is already out there that the writer judges is appropriate to read, and to which he refers the reader to pursue for details. Through this strategy, one can convey a huge amount of information with great economy. This is one strategy to use in the age of information overload, because the confusion in the mass of details associated with modern studies can be partially overcome by directing the reader's attention to a trail that the writer has blazed for the reader in this particular subject.

I should have begun my posts with this bit of explanation, but at that time I was not fully aware of what I was trying to do.

In closing, I would like to say that the style of writing that I use here, and its suggested reading goes counter to the strategy used by many contemporary readers. These are used to seeing so many redundant comments that they do fast reading of articles, skimming them for the details that they are looking for. In trying to learn any advanced form of knowledge, there is a lot of reading, trying, and rereading involved, which I call active reading.

 

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