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Hahahaaaa!!!! I had an essay from a Year 11 student once, it was quite funny and a good read, but she had started in the centre of a blank A3 page, (about twice US letter-size) and wrote in a large spiral outwards. When I asked her about it, she said she had gotten bored just using typical A4 lined paper and decided to do something different! I had a lot of difficulty reading it, I must admit, but it was worth the effort. Everyone I showed it to just looked at it in horror and said, "Typical of this kid, anything to annoy you." Not one of them read it btw, but it showed thinking outside the box, which can sometimes be confronting, but it is good for me to be stretched like this occasionally. Thinking about it, and other people's reactions, I realised:

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Well Virginia, it is actually quite simple, it is called "Social Inertia". We are taught from a very early age to read things from the top to the bottom. So when we are confronted with something different, we seem to go into some kind of mental darkness, or meltdown.

That is why, with electronic documents, whenever we add things to them we tend to go to the last part of the section we want, or the end of the page, then add our comments. It does not matter that we can arrange them any way we like, we just go to the end. We never actually consider doing anything else. And no, there really is no Santa Claus either.
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Its always good to learn something new or gain some insight from a student.

Hi Chris,

I do sympathize with your "sorting convention gripe".

Similarly, when replying to e-mails there are two opposite ways to do things. I follow what seems to me to be the most convention these days, i.e. write my own reply first, followed by a copy (sometimes edited) of my correspondent's email. If I exchange a number of e-mails on the same topic with the same correspondent, I expect our most recent exchanges to be at the top, followed by the oldest ones (inverse chronological order). Unfortunately, a few of my correspondents follow the "traditional" chronological order, adding their most recent response at the end of copies of our previous exchanges. It all ends up in a totally un-sorted order.

Joseph