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Hey man, can you explain what the decimals in the system mean? I get that 001-099 and so on are specifics, but what do the .# mean?

The Dewey Decimal Classification system allows every non-fiction topic to be categorized under one of ten broad subjects, each starting with a different digit (see my pinned post).

Say you were looking for a book about narwhals

5XX: science 59X: zoology 599: mammals 599.5: cetacea and sirenia (aquatic mammals) 599.54: other toothed whales (most whales are under 599.52, and dolphins are under 599.53, while 599.55 is about manatees and dugongs) 599.543: narwhals

Every digit after the decimal point represents a subcategory of the previous. The more digits you add, the more specific the classification. It's turtles all the way down; some subjects are so dense that you need long strings of digits to find exactly what you're looking for. Softball is under 796.3578. Mayan folklore is under 398.2097281. The Beatles are under 782.4216609; that's the exact same number of digits as Mayan folklore, so you'd think they'd have the subcategory all to themselves, but no, they share it with a ton of other bands because it actually represents the broad topic "history, geographic treatment, and biography of specific rock songs."

Not every single subject gets that granular. In fact, most require less than six digits total because there aren't going to be that many books on any given subject to warrant that level of specificity. 551.312 represents everything to do with glaciers; whether they're from Norway or Antarctica (complete opposite sides of the globe), they share the same six digits. There's really no need for more.

But just because a topic exists doesn't necessarily mean your library will carry books about it; mine, for example, has several non-fiction books about platypuses (599.29) but none about possums (599.23). Damn shame.

Feel free to submit any posts you want me to classify, or shoot me an ask if you have a specific topic in mind.

#dewey decimal system #dewey decimal classification #library science #library #categorization #classification #ask me anything #non-fiction

why did you tag that horse video with #chordate? the organizational system that implies fascinates me

#ask #Anonymous #jmc #horse #honse #wikipedia #chordate #taxonomy #categorization #high note post

Over time, I'm growing increasingly convinced that a lot of the craft underlying what people-into-storytelling call 'writing' isn't actually really about writing at all, and it would be useful for many people—me included—to swap over to some different term, like maybe 'storytelling'.

Because, in my experience, the goals pursued by me and by most of the people in my fiction-creation-focused social circles aren't particularly constrained to what's easy to render in prose. They're much more about conveying things to audiences, in ways which prose can certainly be helpful for but which other things can also be helpful for.

To bring up a topical example: Deltarune is a game which is very effective at its storytelling, able to deliver high-impact moments at pretty high density. And it's true that a decent chunk of that is down to being well-written; Toby Fox is, in fact, a pretty skilled wordsmith. But a lot of it is also down to other things: music, art and animation, timing, et cetera. The writing is just one component of many in the overall soup of Factors Behind Deltarune Being Good.

As such, it strikes me as worthwhile to view a lot of the skills traditionally touted as writing skills—plotting, characterization, pacing, et cetera—as, instead, more general storytelling skills. Skills which are more specifically writing skills still very much exist—various elements of how to write good prose, good dialogue, et cetera—but they're not the main mass of what most people are thinking of when they talk about writing skill. The main mass of 'writing' skills apply just as well to such things as text-free comics, voice-free animation, silent-protagonist-explores-abandoned-ruins games, and so forth, even if they're made without any writing-per-se involved in the process at all.

There are many tools which can help with telling a given story. Writing is one. But the writing isn't the story; it's just a medium through which the story can be conveyed. The difference is important.