A Nonlinear Essay

Cognition and learning are nonlinear

Oftentimes, learning about a topic or brainstorming an idea doesn't follow a linear path. If you've ever lost yourself for hours on Wikipedia following links that look interesting, sometimes you go into depth learning about one thing, then you backtrack and learn some more about another thing you saw, and in the end you end up with a sprawling of web of related information.

Or when you're brainstorming, you'll often have ideas and questions that pop up all at the same time, and so you'd write them all down, focus on one idea, then come back to another when you're done. And sometimes down the road you realize some ideas are related to each other, so ultimately everything's interconnected one way or another.

If you're always railroaded into following a linear path, you wouldn't have the freedom to explore ideas as they come naturally. You couldn't jump around to stuff that interests you. It'd be like being forced to read recipe authors' life stories on cooking websites before you can read the recipe, or having to read the whole Wikipedia article before getting to the section you care about.

Essays should reflect how we think

If the way we arrive at some knowledge or an argument is nonlinear, why do we write essays about them linearly? Here we in the Age of Computers, yet all we can do is emulate the the same 5-paragraph essays we hated from grade school. Essays should reflect the way we think and how we get to the ideas that we have, and invite the reader to journey through those ideas just as naturally as we created them.

Therefore I propose the idea of the nonlinear essay, where the connections between ideas being presented are visible up front, and readers can choose the order in which they read the text according to their interests.

In other words, A nonlinear essay gives readers the freedom to read what interests them the most in the moment. Standing at one part of the essay, they can visually see what other ideas are connected to the current one and choose. If they have burning questions about something and want to know more about a certain topic, they shouldn't have to wait for the author to explain some other idea and come back to it!

What are nonlinear essays better at?

Nonlinearity is better for learning

Readers absorb knowledge better when they choose a path that makes the most sense to them. The thing I hate most about textbooks is when authors talk about something really intriguing and then handwave it by saying "we'll come back to this later after we establish XYZ fundamentals," as if my feeble brain couldn't possibly comprehend what lies ahead without their handholding and guidance. Let me take charge of my own learning, at my own pace.

Nonlinearity is more persuasive

If you're tring to persuade someone of something, chances are they'll have the same questions and concerns you had when you were coming up with your argument, but in a different order. If your readers could satisfy their curiosity and doubts immediately by following the connections, wouldn't it make for a stronger and more persuasive essay than if those doubts had to linger and wait around for you to explain them several paragraphs later?

Nonlinearity is better for including side notes

What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that jumped off a cliff?
—Ted Nelson, on the folly of paper

In traditional essays, footnotes, parentheses, and other digressions are tacked onto linear paragraphs as a second thought. Even if the author has interesting things to say about them, it's hard to go into more depth because they're treated like they burden the understanding of the main point because they're optional and are supposed to be periphery.

For example, footnotes at the bottom of pages can't be elaborated on without invading the whole page. And parentheses― well― they're the worst. Parentheses in the middle of a sentence (like this one for example― I'm hoping this will help me illustrate my point about how much I hate them. They suck. A lot. Do you see how much I hate them yet?) can get so incredibly long that at the end of it, you forget what the start of the sentence was.

In a nonlinear essay, we can treat side notes as first-class citizens that can connect to other ideas, and authors can digress to their hearts content. What's more, we can indicate that they're side notes so that if the reader isn't interested in them, they don't have to follow the side note's connections if they don't want to.

How should we present nonlinear essays?

Though I'm sure this isn't the first nonlinear essay in the world, I haven't seen any and they're certainly not commonplace. That means there are a lot of open design questions about how we should write and present linear essays, and I definitely don't presume that the way I present this essay is the best.

Nonlinear essays can be exportable mind palaces

Mind palaces traditionally take shape inside one's mind and never leave it. But does it have to be that way? If we took a traditional essay, created "rooms" for each of its main points and provide some imagery to go along with them, we've essentially made a kind of mind museum. We could have readers imagine themselves going through this museum, maybe by showing them an actual map, which would give them the same visual and spatial memory benefits that a mind palace has while reading our essay.

Imagine this: A big room might hold an important argument, with a centerpiece under a spotlight in the middle illustrating a main point you're trying to make. And just as rooms in a museum can connect to many other rooms, parts of nonlinear essays can connect to many other parts, so to go from one idea to a related idea, you simply walk to the room you're interested in.

Nonlinear essays should not mandate a reading order

We want the reader to be able to explore the essay, picking up on the things they're interested as they see fit. We should write with the expectation that when the reader has finished reading about an idea, they can choose to read any other idea connected to it.

We have to expect some order though; our essay has to introduce its thesis statement early on so the rest of the essay can be understood. Readers probably aren't going to jump from one node to another node that's not connected at all. If you represent connections with arrows, it's generally understood that if an arrow points from Idea A to Idea B, then reading A first helps you understand B better.

Nonlinear essays should have atomic nodes representing key points

To make it easy on the reader to jump around between ideas in the essay, each key point should be represented by a single node. Each node should have a header that summarizes the key point, and the rest of the content should stick to talking about that point. Readers should be able to understand the content after having arrived at it from any other node that refers to it, at least well enough to make decisions about which other connected nodes they'd want to read.

Nonlinear essays should have visual connections, like mind maps

When an author writes a linear essay, they have to pidgeonhole their thought and argumentation process into a linear format. However, in a mind map, ideas flow and connect to other ideas in precisely the way the mind map creator came up with them. Since nonlinear essays seek to represent these connections as naturally as possible, a mind map is a great way to represent the connections between its parts. When writing the essay, the author simply has to clean up the mind map they used for brainstorming and elaborate on ideas that a reader needs an explanation of.

It's easy to get lost in linear writing

When there's a gap between parts of a nonlinear essay that are connected to each other, it's really easy to get lost. If the author refers to a point they made earlier, but didn't (or can't) hyperlink to the point they were referring to, the reader has to slowly and painfully search for the relevant section. Then if the reader wants to come back, there's never a link to places that refer to the current section, so they have to go find where they were originally.

If you have a visual connection between connected ideas, like a line in a mind map, you just can follow the line from either end. Moving back and forth between parts of an essay is easy.

Nonlinear essays need less glue

When writers of linear essays bring up a point from an earlier paragraph and elaborate more on it several paragraphs down, they have to write glue sentences to remind the reader that they were talking about it earlier and transition the reader from an unrelated paragraph. In nonlinear essays, there are no arbitrary disconnects between points that refer to each other. This leads to fewer glue sentences since any two related ideas are connected visually― instead of needing the author to repeat themselves, the reader can just follow the connection.

Mind maps help you organize nonlinear thinking

The mind map is a great way of diagramming nonlinear relationships between facts, ideas, and questions you encounter when you think deeply about something. Rather than writing them all linearly from the top of a page to the bottom, you can jot those ideas down wherever you'd like on the page and draw connections between related ideas.

When you're done you not only have a record of your ideas, but also a visual representation of what ideas are related to each other, and it helps you remember how you got to those ideas in the first place.

Mind palaces use spatial structure to help you remember things

The mind palace technique helps you remember a lot of things at once by taking advantage of your spatial and visual memory, and it revolves around an imaginary palace with stuff in it to remind you of what you need to remember. For example if you want to remember to buy eggs later to bake a cake:

  1. Imagine you're in a room inside a palace (or house, apartment, etc.)
  2. Imagine something absurd that's related to what you're trying to remember, like an elephant-sized cake with eggs all over the side, and someone's written "EGG" on all the eggshells.
  3. Later when you imagine yourself in the palace again, you'll remember this wacky imagery of a giant cake with eggs on it and know you need to buy eggs.
If you need to remember a large number of things, putting them in one mind palace and walking though it helps you remember them all. This technique works really well because it's a lot easier for the brain to remember a place (even an imaginary one) than a bunch of abstract ideas and facts.