Philosophical Perspective: Complexity in a Regular Paragraph
sentence trees
This is a nice goodbye to a beloved product.
- is
- this
- goodbye
- a
- nice
- to
- product
- a
- beloved
- product
“To” should modify “goodbye”. I made it quickly but it shows I haven’t mastered doing simple sentences yet.
It’s been under-remarked-upon how good the Apple Newsroom site has been.
“How” should modify “under-remarked-upon.”
I didn’t quite like this one because it could be translated back into a sentence as:
It’s been under-remarked-upon how the Apple Newsroom site has been good.
I tried out different things and ended up with this which I didn’t like either:
I think “good” should be the child of “been” and how to interpret “good” from the tree just has to be ambiguous.
I think it’s fine either way to have “it” in the subject position or not. This expletive takes the place of the subject, but the real subject is “how good the site has been”, because “how good the site has been” is the thing that “has been under-remarked-upon”. So I think putting “how” as the subject gives you a better idea of what the sentence means. The “it” as subject is more grammatically correct, the parts of speech work together better.
There might be trouble with more complicated sentences to replace the expletive like that.
Another thing you can do with the expletive “it” is to put whatever is actually the subject as the child of “it.”
Back in the Jobs era, Apple would post things to the “Hot News” page of apple.com and when it was no longer hot or news, it would just disappear.
I just forgot “Back in the Jobs era.”
I think “no longer” should modify “was.” It tells you that something used to be another thing, but isn’t anymore.
I don’t think about which clause is main and which is subordinate. I should start doing that and put the main clause to the left instead of whatever comes first in the sentence.
Newsroom posts feel permanent.
- feel
- posts
- Newsroom
- permanent
- posts
Apple’s post today contains a nice gallery of the best and most beloved iPod models: the 2001 original, the 2004 Mini, the 2006 Nano (which really propelled the lineup into what we then thought was the stratosphere of popularity), the 2007 Touch, the 2012 seventh generation Nano, and the Shuffle.^1
I think there should be a third “what” like Elliot had. But I like “thought” above “was.” Because “what was” was something “we thought.” It tells us what we thought.
paragraph tree
This is a nice goodbye to a beloved product. It’s been under-remarked-upon how good the Apple Newsroom site has been. Back in the Jobs era, Apple would post things to the “Hot News” page of apple.com and when it was no longer hot or news, it would just disappear. Newsroom posts feel permanent. Apple’s post today contains a nice gallery of the best and most beloved iPod models: the 2001 original, the 2004 Mini, the 2006 Nano (which really propelled the lineup into what we then thought was the stratosphere of popularity), the 2007 Touch, the 2012 seventh generation Nano, and the Shuffle.^1
quick summary of points:
- conclusion “Newsroom was good” or “goodbye”
- Jobs era not permanent
- Newsroom is permanent
- gallery throughout years
I didn’t pause with the transition to the paragraph tree. I think the video could have made a pause to tell the view to try to make a paragraph tree if he wanted to. All I remembered was that “goodbye” was the root node, but I didn’t like that myself so I didn’t really get much help.
My tree:
I thought the paragraph was mainly about Apple Newsroom, and the goodbye sentence was just an excuse to talk about it. Then I saw that the rest of the article was about the iPod being discontinued. So in the article tree it would make more sense to say this paragraph was about how Apple’s goodbye was nice. I think only the first sentence matters to the overall message of the article, the rest is just an aside because Gruber also wanted to praise Apple Newsroom. He did also tie it in with the iPod by talking about the gallery of iPods in the Newsroom post and which of those iPods was the first big success.
While watching Elliot make the tree I think he thought that “under-remarked” was a detail about “product”. In that case “it” would be a pronoun referring to “product.” As I said earlier I think “under-remarked” applies to “how good Newsroom has been.” You could still have “goodbye” as root, but the connection should be something like “given through Newsroom which has been:”, I guess “detail” can mean that as well though.
I also did a comparison but Elliot had them as siblings, which I think generally is better for trees, although my tree couldn’t permit it. Although Elliot’s tree doesn’t really give a reason for why the comparison is there at all, while mine says “Newsroom is good because it is permanent”
I think “result” describes the relationship better than “as example” because it explains more why the gallery sentence is in the paragraph.
This took 2 hours and 26 minutes.
I spent some time watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DLZEkkKbi4. It was helpful to watch a video of Elliot’s process, and I also understood why he made some choices in the trees.