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One of the
most important communications discoveries of our time is that of
Dr.
Robert Horn who discovered that there are limits to how many things most
people can retain in their short term memories. He discovered that most
people can remember seven things on a good day, downwind, plus or minus two.
So each of us, can probably remember five to nine things. It also helps if
the items are put into some kind of logical order. Shortly after this, he
invented Information Mapping in which
there are seven different major kinds of information to be mapped.
The Procedure Map is the relevant information
related to the block title. The relevant information should be in separate
little paragraphs, of which there shouldn't be more than seven, plus or
minus two.
When making
a Procedural Map which has steps in it, the steps should not be more than
seven, plus or minus two.
And so on,
and so forth.
Classes on
the subject are mandatory before you can receive the Information Mapping
Microsoft Word Template with the .dot file on it. It usually takes two days
of intensive training to come up to speed on starting to use Information
Mapping properly.
Pictured
above is a thumbnail picture featuring a Microsoft Word session using
the INFOMAP.DOT file for a template.
If you click on the thumbnail, it
will take you to a 145,000 byte jpg showing the full size of the Word
document being used to show an example of the Information Mapping
process for entering the text once the complete analysis has been
completed using chunking and choosing the type of Information Map for
which the data is being formatted.
The various options are represented in
a tool bar above the text window in Word. The various buttons facilitate the
formatting:
Note the Infomap between Table and
Window. This has all the functions of the buttons above, plus it also may
have ConvertOldButtons. The INFOMAP.DOT file may differ from version to
version and the Information Mapping Web
Site may have different tools to format the documents.
Nearly all major corporations now use
Information Mapping including institutions like Sony, Bank of America, the
Food and Drug Administration, IBM and Weyerhaeuser. Most instruction sheets
that come with various products are built in Information Mapping format.
A
more complete list of Clients of Information Mapping may be found at the
Information Mapping Website.
On this website the following pages
are formatted using Information Mapping:
Information Mapping is not free for
the taking, nor should it be. It takes instruction on how to analyze the
data even before formatting it. Anyone who has the format tools [for which
they would not be licensed unless they took instruction from the Information
Mapping] but had little or no instruction would not be able to format
documents properly.
For more information, visit the
Information Mapping Website.
This is a
very effective business communication tool which should be considered for
producing internal and external documents.
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