• Typing an idea/thought is hard...

• But verbally explaining it is easy and succinct...

• How can product design help remedy this?

• My hunch is that empty text boxes, which call for fully-formed paragraphs/sentences, are at the root of the problem. Constraints are needed...

I bet things would feel crazy different for branch if it was the same amount of characters but divvied up over like 5-10 boxes.

I disagree: verbally explaining an idea often *feels* easy and succinct because you're engaged with another person (or group of people) who get you to expand when they don't understand what you're saying, or indicate when they [think that they] understand well enough that no further explanation is necessary.

The latter situation is more dangerous: the "great, everybody gets it already" shortcut of conversation feels great, but you don't actually have great odds on everyone *actually* getting it in the way you intended.

A counter proposition: having to formulate and write down the initial idea without the immediate feedback of face-to-face conversation is itself the constraint.

Hmmmm...let's try another formulation, as well: what tools, other than typing in text boxes, are available to someone who wants to convey an idea to others?

In the context of Branch, being able to start from a link, image, video, etc. is obviously one mechanism (you delegate some of that responsibility to the source content), but are there others?

I hear you, Whitney. Though I think you're missing the part that's "hard" for me.

Take the first post of this branch, for example. I made myself write in bullet point form. It took me 2-3 minutes. But if I had tried to turn that into one cohesive, flowing paragraph it would have taken me ~1 hour – without much gained, in my opinion.

So one type of constraint would be requiring folks to express their ideas in "discussion point" form, since without that explicit constraint/expectation from the system it makes this first post look lazy :)

You have to factor in time here too. Think about the difference in how you compose messages in synchronous vs asynchronous situations. Chat vs. tweets vs. email. vs blog etc.

Fair point, but that's not about writing vs. speaking, but one's approach to writing. I wrote a blog post, years ago now, that included the following:

"The Internet is littered with long defunct, three-post blogs in large part because blogging is generally viewed as writing, and therefore every blog must apparently carry the burden of high school English classes: What's my thesis? Have I developed my arguments? Spelling counts! Jeez, haven't I written 500 words yet?" [smr.absono.us

Seems like what you're asking is what approach will let people write without it feeling like "writing," while still guiding them towards creating something that is intelligible to other people.

Almost an outline that's developed by a group...

EXACTLY!!!

I went to a large, urban public high school and still don't have a good grasp of proper punctuation and grammar. That shouldn't matter – fragment sentences can spur up a debate! – but with the text boxes that exist online today, it feels like it does.

And before I head to meeting land, one more thought: while it may not be Branch, I'm intrigued by the idea of a Branch-like system that allows for organizing/grouping as well as new contributions.

As the creator, part of your responsibility is to literally shape the conversation (i.e. the presentation of that conversation), to organize what's coming in as much as you add to it.

Oh, and right there with you on the large, urban public high school: if my dad hadn't been a writer and editor, I don't know where I would have ended up. :)

So, I'm thinking of when gmail switched over to the new composing interface a few weeks ago. For some reason, with the old composing interface that took up the entire browser window I often spent way too much time drafting emails. They were often too long and felt way more permanent and letter-like.

With the new composing box that pops up in the bottom right corner, I feel more like I'm texting or using IM. I've found many of my emails are more casual, they're shorter, and I spend less time composing them.

I've been trying to pin down why this happens. Is it the size of the window? The location on the screen?

Size plays a huge role. Blogger's posting form was deliberately smaller than MT's to encourage shorter more casual content.

At Twitter there was a statistical anomaly in tweet length that correlated to the width of the web-based posting form.

Online vs. offline communication carry such different characteristics. Offline "writing" comes with hands, faces, eyes, mouths. It comes with tone, run on sentences, and's and or's. You can say things like — "you know, it's kind of like this, but not really, and a little bit like this, you know what I mean?" [pause for nod or shake].

So it's interesting to talk about constraints, but what about providing tools to make "empty text boxes" more expressive? What's the equivalent of tone online? Emojis? Gifs? Video chat? Audio?

How can we better combine the publishing power of the web with our finely tuned (millennia in the making!) expressive capabilities?