Field note · August 20, 2023
Cutting a lesson down — Colour is an encoding, not decoration
Colour has exactly four jobs in a chart. Using it for anything else adds noise, and using it carelessly excludes about one in twelve of your readers.
A note from writing Colour is an encoding, not decoration, which took three passes to get to something short.
Colour has exactly four jobs in a chart. Using it for anything else adds noise, and using it carelessly excludes about one in twelve of your readers.
The hard part of writing this was cutting it. The first version covered every case; the useful version covers the case you hit on a Tuesday and names the rest in a sentence. Completeness is a property of reference material, not of teaching material, and confusing the two produces something nobody finishes.
It sits in the Showing the result module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.
Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows Choosing the form before the colours and leads into Communicating a result to someone who will not read your notebook, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.
Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.