Day: May 10, 2016

Blog Prompt 5/6/16

Joel: Italics        Janae: Bold

 

How does visual information help the reader to understand scientific and technical texts?

 

If you have visual information it will help the reader to understand the text. For example if you don’t understand the layers of the crust then you can look at the diagram in the book and that should help you understand. That is called visual learning by the way. If you use a diagram then you need arrows to point to the crust, mantle, and core. When you do that then you know where everything goes and maybe learn more about the inside layers.

 

Visual information can also help the reader understand more when the diagram gives examples of what goes there and why. Like we said in the first paragraph you will know more about the inside layers. In the book it shows what looks like a pizza, but it isn’t. The pizza looking shape is a diagram. The diagram shows the crust, mantle, and the core. The diagram also gives information of what the crust is and what it is made up of. The mantle is made up of silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, oxygen and other materials. The inner core is made up of iron. Then the outer core is nickel-iron. Then the crust is what we are on and is the outermost layer.

 

Did you know that the mantle has an inner mantle and an outer mantle? The outer mantle is just below the crust and the inner is floating on the outer core. You can tell from the diagram that there is two cores because it uses captions that tell us which section is which. You need the captions because you wouldn’t know what you are learning about. For example, if you were just learning about the earth and it’s different sections and the book had a diagram of the layers of the earth. What if the diagram had no captions. How would you know which is which? So with visual information you need to have something to tell what is what.

 

Visual information helps the reader understand what they are reading is because they just give a little more detail and more information. Visual information also helps if you don’t know where things are. Just like what we said  in the second paragraph, you may not know where the different places are like the earth’s layers. Visual learning also helps to understand what you are learning in a different perspective and in a more descriptive way. So visual learning is helpful and useful.