Once again the keying of dungeons is the topic of day. Sam Sorensen writes in defence of the humble paragraph. In doing so he pits the paragraph against the bulleted list, a false dichotomy. In his post the examples of bulleted bolded lists are bad because they are word soup, not because they are lists. There is nothing precluding people from writing strong prose while also leaning on structure. Silent Titans and Gradient Descent both do this well.

Sam believes people consume text with more patience and thought when it’s presented in prose: bullet points and styled text encourage the reader to zip around skim. I can see that argument, but it’s almost certainly the case different people consume information effectively in different ways. A while ago I wrote about how Patrick’s approach to writing is a form of usability, which I think relates to this core point Sam is trying to make. Orthopraxy’s Eat the Book remains a great recent read on this topic.

A lot of caveats and comments on a post I’m sharing, but I’m sharing it because I also dislike the same sort of writing Sam does! We can do better, whether you choose to do better with a paragraphs or bullets.

— Ramanan Sivaranjan, microblogging, March 13, 2026 [osr advice design ] #