One of these things is not like the others...

Mr. Tufte’s chapter on parallelism, comprehension and retention made a lot of sense to me, and served to reinforce what I already knew about the way we, as human beings, learn. When I was twenty-three I spent a summer teaching reading skills through a private school. My students ranged in age from four years old (reading readiness) through adult (speed reading, strategies for better reading retention). Altogether I learned the curriculum for seven different class levels. Though the materials differed, and the techniques, one thing that remained consistent throughout was the method of delivering the information: organization and repetition. At the beginning of each class period I would explain what we would cover that day, and then relate it back to what we had already learned. I would then return to the present lesson in more detail. Each new idea was explained in terms of how it related back to the broader concept. At the end of class I again reiterated everything that had been covered during our time together. What I learned from this uber-structured teaching method was that by defining the context for each new piece of information, the minutia became much easier for my students to understand and retain. It comes as no surprise that this holds true for visual information as well, as Mr. Tufte discusses in Chapter 5. Creating a well-defined structure for the information being presented allows the designer to empower their audience with the necessary parameters to evaluate new data, whether or not the data replicates or deviates, increases, decreases, or ceases.
Chapter 6 was interesting. Using a baseline similarity to highlight variations reminded me of a type of visual puzzle that was around when I was a child. Two almost identical drawings appear side by side. The idea is to spot the differences between the two: stripes instead of polka dots, buckles instead of bows, a spoon where there had been a fork. Drawing #1 is the control. Without it, the variations in Drawing #2 are meaningless. The details that remain constant serve to highlight the differences, and together the two drawings are much more interesting than either one would be on it’s own because searching for “same” and “different” is intriguing. The same concept, when used to express other visual information, is compelling because it engages our analytical, puzzle-loving intellects.