Comment Neatness and orderliness (Score 2) 181
One day when i was working in a chemical laboratory i realized that neatness was a visual quality with only a tenuous relationship to orderliness. Orderliness tends to persist over time, but it does not necessarily look neat. Neatness means in art terms that there are clear top surfaces and hard transitions between perpendicular surfaces such as between stacks of things and walls and floors. Soft transitions such as piles of things lessen the perception of neatness. You can make a room neat without orderliness which means that its entropy will lead it soon back to orderliness but it will not be neat long.