The Magical Number Seven - Deepstash

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The Magical Number Seven

There is a limit to the number of ideas you can comprehend at any one time.

The mind cannot hold more than about seven items in its short-term memory at any one time. Some minds can hold as many as nine items, while others can hold only five. A convenient number is three, but of course the easiest number is one.  

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MORE IDEAS ON THIS

The Top-Down Approach

Fill in the top box

1. What Subject are you discussing?

2. What Question are you answering in the reader's mind about the Subject"?

3 What is the Answer?

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The reasons why most people fail to write clearly

  1. Weaknesses of style, and it is notoriously difficult for a person who has completed the formal part of his education to change his writing style.
  2. Structure of the document: If a person's writing is un...

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The Bottom-Up Approach

You can work out the ideas from the bottom up by following a 3-step process.

1. List all the points you think you want to make.

2. Work out the relationships between them.

3. Draw...

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The Need to State the Logic

All mental processes (e.g., thinking, remembering, and problem solving) apparently utilize this grouping and summarizing process, so that the information in a person's mind might be thought of as being organized into one giant conglomeration of related pyramids.

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Where Do You Start the Situation?

The key characteristic of all opening Situation sentences is that they anchor you in a specific time and place, and thus establish the base for a story to come. 

You begin writing the Situation by making a statement about the subject with wh...

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The Vertical Relationship

The vertical relationship serves marvelously to help capture the reader's attention. It permits you to set up a question/answer dialogue that will pull him with great interest through your reasoning.

What you put into each box in the pyranmi...

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What's a Complication?

Using the previously established truth about the subject as its starting point, the Complication goes on to tell what happened next in the story that inevitably leads to a Question.

  • Have a task to perform - Something stops us from perfo...

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CURATED FROM

IDEAS CURATED BY

hserednytska

An effective communicator and business analyst with an inquisitive mind, strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills

Other curated ideas on this topic:

Our Working Memory

Our Working Memory

The limited amount of load we can take on our working memory, which functions like computer RAM, is called the cognitive load.

Miller's Law states that we need to limit our cognitive loads and hold on to approximately seven number of objects at a given time.

Chunking Information

Chunking Information

The human brain has only a small amount of short-term memory, with the average brain holding only about seven chunks of information at a time, for about 20 seconds.

One can make use of chunking related items together and using clear headers and sections to enhance clarity

18. Not Conserving Your Brain Power

Our average working memory capacity is limited to three to five items. Anything that exceeds these limits has a high chance of falling out of our brains.

Time management tips:

  • Use externa...

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