I have written a lot about math exposition in the past. [Note 1.] Lately I have been thinking about the effect of technological change on exposition.

Texting

A lot of commentators have complained that their students’ writing style has “deteriorated” because of texting, specifically their use of abbreviations and acronyms.

Last January I resumed teaching mathematics after an exactly ten year lapse. My students and I email a lot, post on message boards, hand in homework, write up tests. I have seen very few “lol”s and “cu”s and the like, mostly in emails and almost entirely from students whose native language is not English. (See Note 1.)

As far as I can see the students’ written language has not deteriorated. In fact I think native English speakers write better English than they did ten years ago. (But Minnesota has a considerably better educational system than Ohio.)

Besides, if lol and cu become part of the written language, so what? Many Old Fogies may find it jarring, but Old Fogies die and their descendants talk however they want to.

Bulleted lists

I have been using Powerpoint part of the time in teaching (I had already given some talks using it). People complain about that affecting our style, too. But I think that in particular bulleted and numbered lists are great. I wish people would use them more often. Consider this passage from a recent version of Thomas’ Calculus [1]:

This computation gives the area of a trapezoid. Equation (1) remains valid when and are negative. When , the definite integral value … is a negative number, the negative of the area of the trapezoid dropping down to the line below the -axis. When and , Equation (1) is still valid and the definite integral gives the difference between two areas …

It would be much better to write something like this:

Equation (1) is valid for any and .

• When and are positive, Equation (1) gives the area of a trapezoid.
• When and are both negative, the result is negative and is the negative of the area…
• When and , the result is the difference between two areas…

That is much easier to read than the first version, in which you have to parse through the paragraph detecting that it states parallel facts. That is not terribly difficult but it slows you down. Especially in this case where the sentences are not written in parallel and contain remarks about validity in scattered places when in fact the equation is valid for all cases.

This book does use numbered or lettered lists in many other places.

The future is upon us

Lots of lists and illustrations require more paper. This will go away soon. Some future edition of the book on an e-reader could contain this list of facts as a nicely spaced list, much easier to grasp, and could contain three graphs, with and respectively left of the -axis, straddling it, and to the right of it. This will cost some preparation time but no paper and computer memory at the scale of a book is practically free.

I use bulleted lists a lot in abstractmath, as here. Abstractmath is intended to be read on the computer. It is not organized linearly and a paper copy would not be particularly useful.

By the way, since the last time I looked at this page all the bullets have been replaced with copyright signs. (In three different browsers!) Somebody’s been Messing With Me. AArgH.

The Irish mystery writer Ken Bruen regularly uses lists, without bullets or numbers. Look at page 3 of The Killing of the Tinkers.

Some people find bulleted lists jarring simply because they are new. I think some are academic snobs who diss anything that sounds like something a business person would do. See my remarks at the end of the section on texting.

Notes

1. You can see much of what I have said on this blog about exposition by reading the posts labeled “exposition” (scroll down to the list of categories in the left column.) See also Varieties of Mathematical Prose by Atish Bagchi and me.

2. Foreign language speakers also write things like “Hi Charles” instead of “Dear Professor Wells” or using no greeting at all (which is probably the best thing to do). Dealing with a foreign language requires familiarity with the local social structure and customs of address, of being aware of levels of the various formal and informal registers, and so on. When we lived in Switzerland, how was I to know that “Ciao” went with “du” and “wiederluege” went with “Sie”? (If I remember correctly. Ye Gods, that was 35 years ago.)

References

1. Thomas’ Calculus, Early Transcendentals, Eleventh Edition, Media Upgrade. Pearson Education, 2008.