The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

8.3. Writing Descriptions

Suppose that I am organizing books, and I have decided that it is important for the purposes of this organizing to know the title of each book and how many pages it has. Before me I have a book, which I examine to determine that its title is Die Ringe des Saturn and it has 371 pages. Example 8.5, “Basic ways of writing part of a book description.” lists a few of the ways to write this description. Let us examine these various forms of writing to see what they have in common and where they differ.

Example 8.5. Basic ways of writing part of a book description.

The title is Die Ringe des Saturn and it has 371 pages.

{ book: {"title":"Die Ringe des Saturn","pages":371} }

<book pages="371"> <title>Die Ringe des Saturn</title> </book>

<div class="book">The title is <span class="title">Die Ringe des Saturn</span> and it has <span class="pages">371 pages.</span> </div>

<http://lccn.loc.gov/96103072> <http://rdvocab.info/Elements/title> "Die Ringe des Saturn"@de ; <http://rdvocab.info/Elements/extentOfText> "371 p." .

We examine the notations, writing systems and syntax of each of these description forms, and others, in the following sections.

8.3.1. Notations

First, let us look at the actual marks on the page. To write you must make marks or—more likely—select from a menu of marks using a keyboard. In either case, you are using a notation: a set of characters with distinct forms.470[Com] The Latin alphabet is a notation, as are Arabic numerals. ...