Nick Annoni and Andy Theirl
This chapter talks about the importance of properly organizing your information so that is clear for your audience to understand. This is the most important part of communication because if the information isn’t organized well, you can easily loose the purpose of the message. When audience perceives information that is unclear, they can change the meaning of the message by attempting to translate the information. When that happens, they can take the message in a negative way or just a way that makes no sense to them at all. Some of the tools in organizing the information are to use visual aids for the audience to get a better understanding of the information.
Three main strategies in organizing information:
- Outlines
- Storyboards
- Tables
Outlines are very good to use when you are trying to organize a large amount of information. You may have pages of information but don’t know where to start with it when you are doing a research paper. That is why you use an outline. You start out with using some valuable information and grouping it together on the outline. Then from there you can revise it as many times as you want. You can move information around so that it makes more sense and is clearer to you and your audience.
A storyboard is also a useful tool in presentations. It is simply just a way to tell a story but relevant to your information. They often involve pictures and text on them and are presented in order so that it can show a process. It is more and more done on computer now instead of paper sketches. PowerPoint can be used for it and web sites with links also work as story boards. A storyboard can help you keep your information organized and easy to interpret if you are the audience.
Tables and spreadsheets can be useful when you are comparing two different situations. You can also use them to display statistics. Tables are very much necessary when you have numbers involved in you information.
There are many different ways to order your information such as alphabetic order, numerical order and continuums. These are all very common in everything we do because it simplifies the information.
When looking for information online it can be sometimes challenging. It is sometimes worse when a website is poorly organized and can actually cause the business to lose money because people will give up on there search.
There are more types of organization that are important to use when you are trying to make the information more clear. You can chronologically order the information which is just organizing the information based on the occurrence of information. Spatial organization is where you organize something based on what it is nearby in the process. Ascending to descending order is when you order the information from most important to least important information. Cause and effect is as simple as it sounds, talk about the cause of an instance that happened. From there you can analyze and make an important factor in your research. You may have more then one cause to an effect but the purpose of the research is to decide what the true cause is.
12 comments:
The organization of information can make or break any document. With a poorly organized document it is very difficult to keep the attention of the audience. I always lay out the material I use in a document and organize it in the form of an outline. This prevents the document from becoming random, confusing, and hard to follow. Using a storyboard is another way to organize technical information. For the majority of projects and presentations I have had, I was required to organize a power point with the information in the sequence that I am to present it. By doing this it enables me to stay on track with the information I am presenting. By following the storyboard I am unable to forget any of the information.
This chapter explains the importance of organizing your information and content in a meaningful and appropriate way. In high school, I remember my teachers usually encouraged us to use outlines to help guide our papers and I know for some assignments outlines were required. My teachers also stressed writing numerous drafts for peer editing purposes. It helped me get a basic understanding of how complex the writing process can be. In college, for my first speech class, an outline for every speech we gave was required. Our outlines were a significant part of our overall grade so I know she felt they were extremely important. I think I am pretty familiar with the benefits of having an outline and I know it helps organize the content of your message so it has the greatest impact on your audience.
Having well organized information is key for an effective document/presentation. I find starting with an outline helps me organize ideas into a more cohesive manner.
This chapter explains why organizing is an essential part of preparing a paper or document. I have used the outlines, story boards, and tables numerous times when preparing papers. I like using outlines because it is a good starting place when writing a paper. That way I know I have all the proper information included in the paper and it also helps me to know that I didn't forget anything either. I also think it is easier to revise my paper when I have an outline, I am still able to switch things around. I used the story board technique for writing the instruction sheets. I didn't have a lot of writing on my pictures, but my pictures helped make my instructions more clear. Tables are also a very helpful tool to use. It is good to be able to show things in a table versus trying to compare something all in words. I think it makes a document easier to read. These are all very useful techniques for organizing a paper.
organization of information is quite important because if you do not have the information organized... then how are the readers suppose to know where you are going with this/where you are coming from. For example, imagine we are learning how to play soccer. In soccer, it is important to build the players in slowly and have them adapt. But doing random drills that may not help the player is completely worthless. The whole key of this chapter would be presenting your information in a organized and structured fashion.
Organizing information is essential when trying to give information out. The chapter stresses the importance of order to reports. I use out lines in my papers but I feel things come better to me when I write so its hard to keep things grouped properly. Outlines do although help me present my information by having a easy way to summarize it all.
I agree that organization is very important in any kind of communication, as soon as the listener is lost, usually they stop paying attention. I liked figure 10.5 in the book. I never thought of the table of how to mix primery colors, but it makes sense now that I think about it. There is so much information stored in those simeple three circles. Also, as always I read the sidebar and Im not sure if it is ethical. To me its just like writing a resume, you emphasize the good qualities you have and you try and hide your downfalls. I would say its legal, but unethical.
Organization is important as the stats in the book show for poorly organized web sites. It is becoming more and more common for people to purchase things on-line now. Many sites would be wise to organize much better. In a fast paced world it's easy to get impatient and frustrated constantly searching for something you're looking for. Negative experiences mean they lose business now and probably in the future.
As an average writer myself, I try to give the most attention to the organization of a document. Whenever possible I try to use powerpoints or similar kind of presentation techniques. Also I try to put pictures whenever possible to convey my message to the intended audience. Also having an outline is equally important for me, because that basically summarizes the whole document into simple important topics and headings.
The organization of the information can be just as important as the information itself when putting together a document. This chapter ties together very well with the current assignment. The instruction sheet would most likely be classified under the chronological type of organization. This is probably the easiest way to organize data when attempting to explain a new process to an audience.
It is very important that you make sure your tech documents are well organized. Because many times the people reading tech. documents time is important and the quick they can read and fully understand these documents. so being organized is very important
I have personally had to create a very large document before and if I had not organized the flow of information beforehand, it would have been impossible to follow the logic of my paper. Planning is critical!
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