TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:The Septapartist Myth From:"Mark L. Levinson" <mark -at- MEMCO -dot- CO -dot- IL> Date:Tue, 4 Aug 1998 16:16:57 +0300
Recently on another e-mail list, Mark Halpern of Siebel Systems
wrote in to dispel the idea that a numbered list should ideally
consist of 7 +/-2 items.
The source of the idea, he says, is a much-misunderstood
psychology paper by George Miller. Mark goes on:
I did a little search to see if George Miller, author of the
classic psychology paper, "The Magical Number Seven..." was
still with us. To my delight, he is -- very much so. I asked
him about the relevance of his findings to rules about
how long a printed (or screen-displayed) list should be, and
his answer, in short, was 'not at all'; his exact words were:
But the point was that 7 was a
limit for the discrimination of unidimensional stimuli
(pitches, loudnesses, brightnesses, etc.) and also a limit
for immediate recall, neither of which has anything to do
with a person's capacity to comprehend printed text ...
The complete Halpern/Miller dialog is available from me
( mailto:mark -at- memco -dot- co -dot- il ).
And Mark H. says that Miller's paper is available online, at
"In the meantime," writes Mark H., "let the truth ring out across
this great land, and indeed the great globe itself: no findings
of psychology or any other science have established, or even
suggested, that printed lists or procedures should be
limited to 7, 9, or any other number of steps."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
- Mark L. Levinson - Memco Ltd. - Wallenberg 24 - 69719 Tel Aviv
- work: mark -at- memco -dot- co -dot- il / tel. +972-3-6450049 / fax +972-3-6450001
- home: nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il / tel. +972-9-9552411 or 9555720
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes I feel like a Slinky on the escalator of life.
- Patrick Nolan
--------------------------------------------------------------------
