Edward Tufte Redesigns the Sentence
Edward Tufte has redesigned the sentence. Yeah, that’s right. You know, the thing you’re reading now, left to right. He did it in his new book, Seeing with Fresh Eyes.
But let’s back up. Who is Edward Tufte? Why does this new book matter? And what does it mean to “redesign the sentence?”
Edward Tufte, professor emeritus from Yale, has been called the "DaVinci of Design." His books are inspirational to many technologists, scientists, and artists alike. His first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, was named One of the Best 100 Books of the 20th Century by Amazon.
Tufte is the opposite of a blogger--he’s written five books in 38 years. They are self-published, dense, intense to read, geeky and gorgeous. I’ve been looking forward to his new book since 2015 when he foreshadowed it in a talk to Microsoft about the future of analytics. In that talk, he casually mentioned, “right now, I’m writing a chapter where I've undertaken the modest task of redesigning the sentence.”
What Makes Him Think He Can Redesign the Sentence?
What right does this professor Tufte have to redesign the sentence? For one thing, he’s done this kind of thing before.
Consider sparklines. A sparkline is a tiny, dense graphic that conveys data like a word. 30 years ago, sparklines were buried deep in great scientific writings; today, they’re everywhere. Here’s a set of 15 sparklines from yesterday’s New York Times COVID coverage. Each represents daily deaths per capita by state.
Arguably, Tufte invented sparklines. Or at the very least, he’s the Christopher Columbus of sparklines. In 1982, Tufte documented the concept of small, dense graphics in the Visual Design of Quantitative Information. He named them sparklines in 2006, just as computer graphics were becoming powerful enough to make them commonplace. Microsoft and Tableau even tried to patent the idea and failed, in part thanks to Tufte.
Today, sparklines are everywhere. You can make them with Microsoft Excel. They appear in the media every day to help explain important ideas with data.
So when Tufte says he thinks the sentence needs a redesign, you listen.
Redesigning the Sentence
So let’s examine Tufte’s latest audacious experiment: redesigning the sentence. The idea is simple—make the sentence graphical. It took a while to grok his idea. In Seeing With Fresh Eyes, he uses examples from Galileo, LaTex, and Tree of Reflections by a Concave Spherical Mirror. Heady inspiration! Frankly, I was struggling.
Then I noticed a sentence in the book’s introduction that seemed like a typo at first. It wasn’t a mistake; it was a graphical sentence:
You read a graphical sentence like a Mad Lib with multiple answers. The three stacked words (in this example, you, I, and they) form several ideas from one sentence. This innocuous-looking sentence is loaded with meaning: it’s Tufte’s riff on critical thinking. He challenges us to question what we know in three ways:
How do you really know that?
How do I really know that?
How do they really know that?
Like Sparklines, I found myself lingering over Tufte’s visual sentences. But then I thought: I WANT TO TRY TO WRITE ONE! But where to begin?
My First Graphical Sentence
I tried and failed to write a graphical sentence. Then I thought: maybe if I translated an existing, simple sentence…
Go, Dog. Go! leaped to my mind.
Go, Dog. Go! by P. D. Eastman was one of my favorites as a kid. I translated pages 4 and 5 in my first graphical sentence, below in red.
A lot is going on here! Writing a visual sentence feels like writing in 3D. It’s like a cross between mind maps and everyday writing.
The act of writing a visual sentence reveals new ideas. For example, in my first attempt, I didn’t include the word “crashed.” Then I noticed two dogs arguing over a head-on crash. I added the word “crashed.”
I think this is what Tufte is aiming for: to help us see with fresh eyes.
A Review of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, in a Graphical Sentence
There’s so much more to explore in Tufte’s new book. And I wonder if graphical sentences will go mainstream like Sparklines.
I’ll leave you with a review of Tufte’s new book, Seeing With Fresh Eyes, in a graphical sentence:
