Paragraph Block

At the core of this new writing experience is the concept of a paragraph block.

You will note that, when you are writing with the standard text editor, a new block is created as soon as you hit return.

This design is unlike any other writing experience you have ever had. Understanding why this experience was designed opens the door to a deeper understanding of the power of this writing environment.

Let's start at a basic, functional level. The primary power of this feature is that you can move paragraphs easily around a page, by simply dragging and dropping them when you are editing.

You can drag and drop these blocks between pages. And you can drag and drop them between different wiki sites.

This experience of a paragraph as a Movable Block is critical to our understanding of the wiki, one that could, potentially, as significant as the Impact of Movable Type.

You see, once you begin to see a paragraph as a block, one is liberated to focus on it as a coherent unit - an expression of a single idea - that floats in relationship to other ideas.

When you write, you will find, you begin to sharpen your focus on a single idea, and one idea at a time, in an attempt to elegantly convey its precious meaning.

The idea then sits in a flow of ideas on the page, but can be moved around to better express the meaning, what we might call a concept which is a larger container of meaning.

Writing this way allows you to build increasing larger containers of meaning, from words, to ideas, to concepts and beyond - to things we call patterns that make up Pattern Languages that hold universal human meaning.

This structure of writing is liberating and very intentional - built on experiences that lie at the heart of Agile.