Yesterday, I sat behind a family in church, which included a little girl, who is maybe five or six years old. She had a spiral bound notebook in her lap and a pen that distributed pink ink. At one point, she held her notebook up and I could see that she'd clearly written five or six bullet points under point number one of whatever it was she was outlining--maybe the sermon? I couldn't read what her bullet points said because I was too far away, and because I'm old and my eye sight isn't as good as it used to be, but I was struck by the fact that she was already using bullet points.
One of my earliest memories of writing, or for the sake of this conversation, note-taking, was of a grade school teacher who taught us how to outline, the old formal way, using Roman numerals. I'm guessing that the advent of MS Word and maybe other word processing programs before it changed the way we format our handwriting, which if it's true, I find to be incredibly ironic.
I write in bullet format all of the time. As close as I get to an old fashioned outline is to use a numbered list, following by bullet points under each number. And now, the next generation probably has no idea about the old way of outlining. And that's okay. Someday they'll stumble across it and probably be glad that they weren't born in an era that complicated things so much.
