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Subject:Re: 7 plus or minus 2 From:Chuck Melikian <chuckm -at- MDHOST -dot- CSE -dot- TEK -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 28 Jul 1997 14:59:59 -0700
Geoff Hart wrote about the magical number 7:
#
# I've seen several mentions of George Miller's "7 plus or
# minus 2 rule" to justify chunking information into 5-9
# pieces, but this leads me to ask one crucial question that
# I've never seen answered: has anyone actually tested
# Miller's research to confirm that it applies in the context
# of technical writing? I have not doubt that his underlying
# principle is sound (i.e., that there's a limit on
# short-term memory), but I haven't seen anything that says
# it is 7 plus or minus 2. I haven't tried a literature
# search, as I lack the resources to do so, so I was
# wondering whether any of our academic colleagues might have
# the answer.
Last Thursday I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte. I'm sure
that most people recognize the name; Tufte is the author of
Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information and another book whose title I can't recall at the
moment (the books are at home--not at work).
Tufte makes the point in his seminar that the 7 +/- 2 rule does
not apply to written material. He points out that Miller's research
applies only to short-term memory. Paper (or even an overhead) is
external memory. It is not subject to the same limitations as
short-term memory. After all Tufte points out, how useful would
a dictionary be if it only had seven entries? (Not much different
than seven bullet items.) If the idea of remembering only seven
things at a time applied everywhere, how could we remember the
content of a sentence of more than seven words? (Yes, an idea
or chunk of information can be made up of multiple words.
Nonetheless, we don't routinely write sentences of dozens of words.)
Chuck Melikian chuck -dot- melikian -at- tek -dot- com
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