The purpose of this conference is to help you deal with the revolution that is taking place in how we read:

We don't.

Or rarely do we read in the traditional word-for-word manner. Today we are skimmers and scanners, cherry pickers and info grazers. Especially on the web.

One study at Sun Microsystems Science Office discovered that 79 percent of users scan and skim a web page instead of reading it word-for-word. Other studies have found that the average length of unbroken text in today's most popular newsstand magazines is 100 words.

Oh my. Is this the end of literacy, as we know it? Maxim and Men's Health aside, no, not at all. Chunking is actually a reintegration of humankind's oldest form of literacy--visual. In today's chunked writing, including business writing, you find a new world of visual devices for breaking up the page into easily discernible, easily scannable bits that hunker beneath the umbrella of the writing's main title.

Managers, if they want to succeed, must master the formats and visual gadgets demanded by this new type of reading, and that means learning to integrate text and graphics.

I call this way of writing "chunking," a term originally coined by cognitive psychologists as a way to describe the mind's optimum way of processing information--in discrete bits. As our lives become more information-rich, and especially as technology changes how we process information visually, contemporary business writing is taking on a highly chunked, highly visual format.

Consider these differences:

Traditional vs. Chunked Texts: Five Essential Differences
Text Type	*Traditional*	*Chunked*
Linearity	Text contains ideas and sentences that move in a straight line through time and space, left to right, top to bottom	Discrete blocks of blocks of text can be read in any order, bottom to top, right to left, etc.
Sequentiality	Ideas and information are given logical connection by the writer and must be decoded by the reader	Connections between bits signaled visually, augmenting textual connections provided by writer
Literacy Skill	Traditional reading skills: distinguishing main point and supporting detail, perceiving underlying rhetorical strategy, vocabulary in context, etc.	Visual and textual literacies used to create meaning through processing of graphics and text simulataneously
Whole to Part	Best experienced in its entirety. To receive all that writer intended, reader must move from beginning to end without skipping parts	Best experienced as a collection of parts. The whole provides a convenient framework for its parts, with the reader choosing which parts to attend to and which to combine for meaning
Decoding Method	Decoded with word-for-word saccades (eye movements that stop and start as reader proceeds from left to right)	Decoded first with scanning, then with skimming. Reading word-for-word is optional

Even more impressive are the five advantages offered to your readers of chunk writing:

Increased accessibility.
Traditional texts are too often like a library without a card catalog: lots of great stuff, but where's the stuff I want? In contrast, chunked texts allow the reader to locate quickly and directly the information of most importance to him or her. Instead of pages of black squiggles on a page in a uniform font and size, the chunked text uses clearly separated, distinct parts that negate the need to read in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom manner as you search for what you want. This is "Drive-Thru Reading."

Reader relief.
Readers actually report a physical sense of relief when moving from a traditional text to a chunked one--a feeling of a burden being lifted, of life made easier. Suddenly, you no longer have to invest valuable time in laborious word-for-word reading. Therefore you can get more from the time you invest into a text because a skilled chunk writer has given you a visual road map to the information.

Greater value.
Readers (including your boss) usually perceive that a chunked text offers more value than a non-chunked text, although the two may contain the same information. As your B&S text points out in Chapter 10, readers are impressed by graphics and enjoy the experience of the reading or presentation more when visuals are a part. Also, increased ease of access to the information via chunks and graphics adds to the sense of the text's value and your personal value as an employee.

Multi-sensory learning.
We've known for a long time that a child learns faster and more deeply when multiple senses are involved: the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Chunked texts take advantage of this learning principle by integrating movement, sound and colorful visual elements, especially in PowerPoint, Flash or other multi-media presentations.

Customization.
One of the true powers of chunking is the freedom you give to readers to choose what they want to read in any given text. Chunking empowers the reader to create his or her own text based on the chunks he/she chooses to emphasize. The reader, more than ever, can decide what is important, not the writer.

So, are you ready to get chunked?

Here's what I want you to do: Learn to create some information graphics. You already know how to create tables because we've been practicing them. Now it's time to take it to the next level--graphs and charts (two terms often used interchangeably).

You have two options:

Option 1: Use your PowerPoint software on your computer to create at least one type of chart. If you don't know by now, the ability to use PowerPoint is quickly becoming a critical skill for a manager, almost as important as knowing how to type.

Didn't know your PowerPoint had a graphing machine? No problem. Here is a link that will provide you a tutorial on how to use the graphing function of PowerPoint: MicroSoft PowerPoint Tutorial for Graphing.

Option 2:Not into PowerPoint? Nada problem. For all you HTML freaks out there (BTW, you do know, don't you, that W3C has replaced SGML/HTML with XML as the standard for mark-up languages?), here is a link that will allow you to create a graph, then save it as a jpeg for insertion into a document: National Council of Education Statistics.

Please submit as attachments to your response to this thread. As usual, you must also respond substantively to two posts by your colleagues.

Due date: Tuesday, August 3.