027 This month’s tip:

Remember the rule of three.

When writing (or designing) to persuade, there's a danger in going too far. That is, it's dangerous if your audience feels daunted by the material being presented. They may feel you're trying to overwhelm their defenses, and that may make them suspicious, which is never a good thing.

It's also true that people can't absorb too many things at once. In presentation terms, if you have too many bullets on one slide, most of them are just taking up space. When organizing content, three is a good number. (As in, it's as easy as 1-2-3.) That doesn’t mean limiting every screen to three bullets, but present the basic concepts in groups of three. Let sub-bullets expand on the basic ideas.

Three is almost a magic number in fact, as considered in this entertaining article by writer Walt Kania, or this one by speaking coach Patricia Fripp.

 

November 2005 - Volume 3, Issue 11

READ ME FIRST

We've read some interesting articles recently about the design of electronic newsletters, and that's started us thinking about structural changes to Directions. We're asking for your help in deciding what we might do, if anything. After all, you're the ones who are reading it.

Right now, we have a two step approach, in which the newsletter itself sits on the K Street website. Instead of the actual newsletter, we distribute a "mailer" which contains the titles and the first line of each article, with an anchor link that leads to that article on the site. (Our mailer goes out in multi-part format, which means it includes both an HTML and a text version; those of you who opt to receive the latter only get a link to the whole newsletter, not to the individual articles.) The theory is that this approach saves space in your In Boxes, and also lets you scan the whole issue at a glance.

There are other ways to approach it, though. We could send the whole text in the mailer, or send the whole text of one article, with other articles linked in as "also in this issue." We could continue to send the HTML/Text multi-part, or switch to plain text.

We've set up a short reader survey, and we'd love it if you'd tell us what you think. It's just four questions about what we're doing, and what we might do differently, and you can respond by clicking here. Thanks in advance for taking the time.

Information Overload

Information Overload (IO) is a common ailment of the modern age, although not everyone see it the same way. Some IO sufferers see it as a signal-to-noise problem: there's so much junk, coming in so quickly, that it's hard to focus on the good stuff. They worry about the time that's wasted on nonessential, unrelated frip-frap. However, having too much of the good stuff can be a problem in itself.

Studies have shown that people often make better decisions when they have fewer facts to consider, something that can be true for everything from managing investments to guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. Once upon a time, if you were making a major purchase, you could check out Consumer Reports, read one or two specialty articles, and feel pretty well informed. Today, there are probably hundreds of voices to consider, especially if you start reading the customer reviews that are featured on many websites. Where do you stop? In Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that cultivating an ability to recognize the points that matter is better than lengthy analysis of the details. He calls it "thin slicing."

It's something to think about., in the fight against IO. Just don't think about it too much...

Calling All Rumors

Last summer, we heard a story about a major aircraft manufacturer, back in the pre-digital age, that established an official Rumor Control Department. Among other things, this department offered a hot line which employees could call, to ask whether a specific rumor were true. Its mandate was to provide real information, thereby quashing the rumor, but it also reported to management about what people were hearing on the grapevine. That was a useful function too, since management was often the last to know about news that was spreading through unofficial channels.

Today, news travels faster than ever, circling the globe in the blink of an eye. It can't really be managed, and certainly can't be stopped. But it can't be ignored, either, especially in communications programs that deal with organizational change. At BeyondIntractibility.org, Heidi Burgess and Michelle Miese see three facets in effective rumor control: a mechanism to determine what rumors are in circulation, a strategy for figuring out whether they're true or false, and a mechanism for correcting the ones that need correcting. All three of these needs are addressed by the City of Baltimore, which has had a rumor control department for over 30 years.

Snopes.com is a good, general purpose resource for Internet hoaxes, urban legends and general email misinformation. It's a site you should bookmark, if you haven't already. Who among us has never been fooled into forwarding something silly to our friends? Check first, feel less foolish later.

Wikibooks!

We've written several times about the Wikipedia, the free on-line encylopedia that's produced by a loose confederation of volunteer editors, working only for the love of the project. As odd as the idea seemed the first time we came across it, it's become the place we visit first when searching for background information. So far, it hasn't let us down.

And although it's not especially new, we've just discovered Wikibooks, another site sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation. Here, you can access "book modules" (think chapters) on a broad variety of subjects. Co-founder Jimmy Wales has said that Wikibooks intends to provide for free the textbooks needed to study any subject, at any level, online. Pretty cool.

The dynamic, open-content nature of the material might make some readers uncomfortable, and we're pretty sure it wouldn't fly with the Kansas School Board. But if you're interested, you can find texts on everything from Ada Programming (on the Programming Language shelf), to Outdoor Survival (on the Miscellaneous shelf). If there's a subject on which you have some special knowledge, there's no reason you can't write a text of your own, and share it here with the rest of the world. But be serious. One interesting page to check is the discussion area in which the Wikibook authors vote on whether individual books should live or die.

Unsubscribe  |   Change your profile

HOME   |    © COPYRIGHT 2008 KNOWLEDGE STREET LLC