.@yq_acc translated one of my recent posts from English to "English with better syntax highlighting". I encourage reading it, it's actually much more readable than my original post :D It's been fascinating to watch programming-language-style syntax structure and highlighting break out into written language. I feel like we've seen "traditional print media style prose" fall away over the past few years and get replaced by a much heavier emphasis on bullet points, diagrams, etc. These ideas that are fundamentally superior to linear written text, and the fact that programming languages, a medium without pre-existing cultural expectations, adopted them right from the beginning is evidence of this. Speech has to be linear, because our ears can't hear many things in parallel, but for a long time we've been hampered by the idea that our representation of written words has to simply be a direct linear representation of the speech. What if we go beyond that? What if we make the *structure* of an essay, either low-level grammar or higher-level ideas (which claims support which other claims, what ideas are placed in contrast to which other ideas, the temporal ordering of some process that is being described...), much more visible so that the reader's mind can subconsciously pick it up? In principle it can be very effective: if I make a statement X supported by A, B and C, and the reader immediately feels the most curiosity about B (or they already understand A and C, or...), then they can just skip straight to B. I hope that over the next few years we can see a lot more innovation in writing style. I'd even say break open the taboo, fictional work should also be open to these kinds of things (prose <-> graphic novel is a spectrum, not a binary) I also hope we can figure out standardized markdown extensions to make all these things nice and easy. I know of various textual diagramming languages, but it would be good to have a really good one that gets the same adoption and legitimacy that markdown has. https://x.com/yq_acc/status/2029591388900528304