Prof. Schwartz-Bloom Lecture Response

While I don't think you always need more than one representation of data to get your point across, I think providing more than one way of looking at data can never hurt, and could be very helpful to people who didn't understand the first representation. The more representations of the same data you have, the deeper you 'drill' the information into the heads of the people looking at your representations. However, when you are representing something of common knowledge, you don't need to represent the data in multiple ways, becuase the viewer will already understand what you are representing. In other words, the more abstract the idea, the more ways you should depict your data. For example, this picture depicts red blood cells of a human. If the audience is already familiar enough with what blood looks like, then this representation is enough to re-introduce them to the idea. However, if the audience isn't familiar with how blood looks (like maybe young children who haven't taken any biology), you should provide more depictions of the data to help drive your point across. For example, showing this image, as well as the first one, will help show uninformed viewers what blood really looks like through the similarities between the two pictures. As they say in English class, when trying to get information across, "say what your going to say, then say it, then say it again". This principle applies to all representation of information, not just writing.

While I do consider myself a visual thinker, I still remember one mnemonic device from high school that my teacher taught us to help us remember which words are associated with 'essere' in the past participle form of the Italian language. Each letter in the mnemonic device "SUPERMANDAVE" stands for a certain Italian word that starts with that letter. Whenever I would need to use the past participle on a test, I would recall SUPERMANDAVE to help me remember how to correctly form the past participle.