Chapter 10 – Organizing Information
Paulina Manzo & Scott Bertrand
Developing the Organization for Information
· Outlines
o Tools to help you manage the material for a document
o Help you arrange and examine and then rearrange collected information
o Sequence must be logical
o Also serve as a table of contents
· Storyboards
o Another way to organize information – two purposes and audiences
1. A powerful organization tool for writers and designers who create them
2. A short dramatic visual summary showing the gist of the final project for clients or customers.
o Passive Storyboard – the writer or designer usually walks a client through the sequence
o Active/interactive Storyboard – requires the user to be engaged in the process; ex: PowerPoint’s.
o Animatics Storyboard – drafts of animated presentations that are “produced by photographing storyboard sketches on a film strip or video with audio”
o Benefits – saves time and money, reduces changes later in the process, people involved in the project can review and revise the storyboard, and a way to explore alternative ideas.
· Tables and Spreadsheets
o Enable you to classify information into comparable groups and then identify categories of details about each group
· Implementing the Organization of Information
o Print Documents – chunk information into paragraphs that readers can see
o Electronic Documents – chunk information as well, they have additional benefit of hyperlinks
o Oral Presentations – the audience has to listen for cues about shifts to another topic, so changes in vocal pacing, pitch, and inflection take the place of indentation and line spacing.
o Technical Visuals – labels and cues direct movement through the visual
· Organization Basics
o Alphabetical order, numeric order, and continuums
o Topic sentence and transitions to signal organizations
§ Topic sentence – indentifies both the content and organization of a paragraph so the audience anticipates what forthcoming information is about and how it will be sequenced.
§ Transitions – words, phrases and sentences that act as the glue to connecting ideas and sentences within a single paragraph.
o Whole/Parts Organization
§ Presents readers with a relationship between the whole (whether an idea, object, or entire system) and parts of that whole (whether on a micro level or macro level)
§ Involves separating a single item into individual components and related types of an item.
o Chronological order
§ Presents readers with material arranged by sequence or order of occurrence.
o Spatial Order
§ Arrangement by relative physical location
§ Describes the physical parts of nearly anything, from cellular structures to the orbital path of a satellite.
o Ascending/Descending Order
§ Ascending order – least-to-most important
§ Descending order – most-to-least important
o Comparison/Contrast
§ Tells readers about similarities and differences
· Comparisons identifies the similarities of various ideas, objects, or situations
· Contrast is the differences
o Cause and Effect
§ Focuses on precipitating factors and results
§ You can move from cause to effect or from effect to cause
· Inductive reasoning – moves from specific instances to broad generalizations
· Deductive reasoning – moving general premises to specific causes
22 comments:
I know in a lot my science classes they require a certain level organization within our lab reports. Typically we break it up into sections - usually they are in chronological order based upon our lab that week. I think for other classes, where it is more about presentations and what not, powerpoints are my favorite visual aid to use. I haven't worked much with anything else though. I really like to use tables and spreadsheets from Excel to organize a bunch of information as well. I think when you use these tools, your documents and presentations look a lot nicer and also are easier to understand.
I know we have all read unorganized papers or watched unorganized presentations; they are not fun or easy to pay attention to. When I am sitting in a class and there is a person or a group giving a presentation that is not very well organized I loss interest fast and it makes the group seem unprepared. When giving information I feel it is so important to make it organized in a logical way, it makes it flow better and it makes it more likely that the audience will not get lost or just stop paying attention.
Chapter 10 was very helpful with organizing information. I feel the more organized a person is the more professional they present themselves. When put into groups for a class I tend to want to be organized and have everything figured out before leaving class. I think using power points is very helpful to keep an audiences attention. Also adding visual aids to the presentations helps keep people from losing interest. Also i think it is helpful to have things in order and transitions make it run smoothly without it sounding choppy.
Chapter 10 given me a refresher about how to organize my work a little bit better. Weather it be a presentation and using proper transitions to continue on to a different topic, or in a paper to list things in order of events or importance. I know in the past that I've had some pretty sloppy papers that I've wrote and presentations, but practice makes perfect. I'm not saying im good or anything, but this chapter may help me in the future.
Chapter 10 is really about just being organized. Being organized helps people really get their point across to the audience, whoever that may be. Being organized helps people write papers, or give presentations that are excellent and provide information in which the audience will understand. One example of an organized paper is a research paper. For my Biology class I was writing a paper that had headings and under each heading there was a page or two that explained more about the heading. This helps explain the expirement in a step by step process and keeps it to the point.
When I make a presentation I always make the attempt to switch up the organization to make it more enjoyable for the listener. If we keep making the same presentation every time it can be boring for the people listening. If you cannot make the presentation catch someone's eye and get them to listen then what was the point of the presentation in the first place. I always think that if you can keep organization high and not boring you can ultimately give better presentations.
Organization is a key ingredient to a great piece of work. In other words an organized presentation is a great presentation. Of course there are other things that make a good presentation, but it is very important to present the information in an organized way. If the information is scattered about, many people tend to lose interest or don't take in the information. This chapter explains the importance and how to correctly organize your work.
I thought this chapter was very helpful. We use some sort of organization day to day to keep everything together. I can follow presentations that are being given if they have good organization and flow. Organization is a very good skill that I am sure our future jobs will look to make sure we have strength in that area. This chapter is one of the more helpful chapters because it is an important skill to have just like editing and revising.
It really helps make reports and big projects neat by having them in a neat organized way. It makes them look a lot more professional having them organized. Being a Construction Management major I took CM 250 where we were required to build a spec book for a design build project. The book was about 150 pages and we kept it all neat by having a table of contents and by keeping all of the work and data in order outlined by the samples. I have read some documents that don't have a table of contents and it is very hard to try and find the information that you need.
When looking at a power point or reading a document, I find it much easier to follow if the information is well organized. I get confused easily when there is no real order to the information given. I also think it is much easier to present information when it is well organized. I have made the mistake of trying to present disorganized information. It made me more nervous and the presentation less effective and probably pretty boring. I thought it was great that this chapter discussed several very useful ways to organize information. These are skills everyone will be able to use in their line of work.
This chapter talks about how to present your work in an organized fashion. An audience would lose your attention if your work is disorganized and thus your message would be put across. What I have learnt from this chapter is that a good presentation should be well organized and it should engage your audience into it. The presentation can be in an outline format or chronological order for easy remembrance and including a visual aid will also improve the presentation.
Organization is the key for every aspect of life. If you are well organized it saves you and others time and confusion. Being a construction major it is very important to keep all of your documents organized. I use excel when doing bids because there is so much information. It keeps it easy to access and read the information. Also, being organized helps other people. If you are absent at your job someone may need to go into your work area and find certain documents and this makes it much easier for them. This chapter did a great job explaining this.
It is important to speak and/or write with organization because it makes you, the speaker/writer, look professional and know what you're talking about. Without organization, you will seem uneducated on your topic and your audience will have little faith in you. Also, with organization, your audience will find your presentation/article easier to follow.
This chapter was about outling and laying out papers or presentations. I know I have done many presentations in my days of schooling, and I have a well organized ones and poorly organzied ones, and I know that when I have a poorly organzied project, it is a lot harder for me to present it to the class. I also know as being an audience it is really boring and you lose focus when trying to listen to a badly outlined projects.
This chapter talks about the importance of organizing information. If a presentation is not structurally order and unorganized, it will be hard for the audience to follow. In the past I have done my share of unorganized documents. When I first started designing web page, I didn't think about organizing the page and creating a layout. I was designing the navigation and content as I go. This never give any satisfying result. Also, this method of design is greatly inefficient in the long run. Creating an outline will greatly help the structure of a web page and greatly improve your efficiently.
Right now I am doing my senior design project. I know for a fact that if you lack the organizational skills, you will suffer dearly. In the fall we had to do a rough draft of our technical paper and we thought we kept things fairly organized, boy were we wrong. We had to scrounge around to find the information that we needed. This semester we have tried to keep better records, for the final draft of our technical paper that will be do at the end of this semester.
I agree with the author in this chapter about organization. In several of my english classes organization was stressed to make an effeicent paper or presentation. To keep your audience or reader interested in what they are learning about really has to do with the level of organizing. In many of my previous papers during the revision of the paper i had found organizing my thought were a better outcome. For example in computer science a step by step process requires exact orgainzing or the program won't function.
This chapter has a lot of great insight on outlining. The way this fits into my major is that I need to be able to outline what the person has done for exercises or outline what I need them to do and communicate this across to them. When sitting in front of the board and telling them about patients I need to be able to outline what I did by maybe using the story telling theories explaining what I did with the patient and how it is coming along. Writing papers as a professional I will need to be able to outline with a main topic, the organized data; starting the paper off with something to interest the person and then go form least to most interesting or useful. Building up to what the outcome is important for the audience I am talking to.
This chapter was particularly helpful since we're in technical communication and we produce lots of projects and assignments that require certain organization. Also since we are presenting powerpoints on a topic related to our major, it is important to organize it in a favorable manor in order to keep our audiences focused. Also organization within projects and assignments shows a professional aspect which is always a good thing especially when we are about to enter the 'real world' as professional adults.
If a presentation is not organized it is easy for anybody to lose interest. That is why this chapter is important, it explains how you can organize your work a little better. If you jump from one point to another in a presentation your audience can get lost and confused if you don't use the right transitions.
It is important to organize oral presentations. A great tool is power point, which we have all learned from our in-class presentations. Not only do the power point slides organize the information visually for the audience, but it also gives the speaker something to reference back to.
Personally I am terrible at organization, especially my thoughts when writing a paper. I find myself coping and pasting whole paragraphs all over a given paper. When reading this chapter, I believe this will help me out in the long run, in terms of organizing not just in papers but in spreadsheets and other programs.
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