Reading through the required two chapters for our Wednesday class I have to say that chapter 7: Organizing Your Information was the one that caught the attention my easily distracted mind. Not to say that chapter 6: Researching your subjects did not get my full dedication, but I have done a fair amount of research before so it had a bit of that "old news" feeling that you get when your instructor goes over a subject you already mastered in a lecture, so your mind sort of shuts off. But not everything was "old news" as I learned about the primary, and the secondary, types of research and what they entail.
So chapter 7 was definitely easier to read as a result of the way it was presented itself: it had a lot more breaks with headlines, and picture of examples of each way you can organize information in a technical document. The first page of the chapter really jumps out at the reader: there is striking picture of the border between Haiti and Dominican Republic taken from a Al Gore's website about climate change: two different countries sharing the same island, in the Haiti's side their tropical forest is completely destroyed while Dominican Republic's side of the island was almost pristine. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words and Gore's website get their most important point across: environmental damage in our world and the climate change that comes with it is real (Haiti's side) but there is something we can do about it (Dominican Republic side).
That supports the book claim that in a report/study the most effective way to get your message across is to organize it in a most-important-to-less-important pattern because "readers often want the bottom line first". I definitely agree with that as I read a lot of articles on the internet everyday and often just want to read the main points and move on as there is always a lot of other articles to read, and things to do in real life. I was also surprised to find out that often is not the case in outside of United States so I guess it is a cultural thing.
