Organization.

Trouble with the way a book is organized may indicate

a conflict between the author’s writing style and
your personal learning style.

As Felder and Soloman explain,1 sequential learners

process things methodically, step by step, relating each
new piece of information to the facts that came before it
as though following a recipe.

Global learners learn in bursts and insights, grabbing

huge handfuls of seemingly unrelated
information and then suddenly (and often
unexpectedly) establishing connections between ideas
in one great big “Aha!”

If you’re a sequential learner and you run into that rare

textbook that’s written globally, your best defense is to
search first for some sort of summary at the end of the
chapter that will pull things together and provide you
with a road map for your wild ride.

If the author writes sequentially and you learn globally,

you might as well get used to it. The vast majority of
courses and texts are delivered in a sequential
fashion.

Global learners can adjust to a sequential text and add

some unaccustomed structure to their way of looking at
things by taking a few moments to systematically
survey a reading assignment before diving in.

Keep in mind that most relationships, even those

between a student and a textbook, take work and
take time. But if there truly seems to be a disconnect
between you and your book, you may want to find a
supplementary text or “read” the original book in a
different form.
Therefore, any reading you do in a second text will be in
addition to your regular text, not instead of it. Once you have
a better grasp of the subject or ideas you were struggling with,
return to the regular text and see if it is easier to understand.

Use the OPTIC System

Many students mistakenly give visuals only a quick
glance or even skip over them entirely. But these
graphic materials should be scrutinized as carefully and
as systematically as paragraphs. The OPTIC system will
help you take an organized approach to this task.

The five letters in the word OPTIC (which means

“pertaining to the eye”) provide you with a simple
system for remembering the five elements of analyzing
a visual:
O is for overview.
P is for parts.
T is for title.
I is for interrelationships.
C is for conclusion.

Using these five elements as cues, you can conduct a

meaningful analysis of almost any diagram, graph, or
illustration by following these steps:
1. Begin by conducting a brief overview of the visual.
2. Then zero in on the parts of the visual. Read all
labels, and note any elements or details that seem
important.
3. Now read the title of the visual so that you’re clear
on the subject it is covering.
4. Next, use the title as your theory and the parts of
the visual as clues to detect and
5. Finally, try to reach a conclusion about the visual
as a whole. What does it mean? Why was it included
in the text? Sum up the message of the visual in just
a sentence or two.

Format Factual data—especially statistics—can be

placed in graphic formats that distort
the information. The book How to Lie with Statistics
exposes some of the devious tricks that are used and is
also fun to read.

For example,
you should be wary of the
word average, and you should try to find the highest
and lowest figures that went into each average.

Two companies may have an average salary of $29,000.

But if the range of salaries in one company is from
$6,000 to $90,000, and the range in the other company
is from $20,000 to $35,000, the salary policies of the
two companies are quite different.
Converting words
into pictures.
Even though visual
communication is one
of the predominant
channels for
information, visually
oriented students
can use their
graphical
way of thinking to
actually rethink
information that
may not have been
conveyed visually
in the first place