In this chapter, you learned that readers scan a document to make sense of it and to understand the document’s organizational structure and visual hierarchy. To test this idea, try the following...

In this chapter, you learned that readers scan a document to make sense of it and to understand the document’s organizational structure and visual hierarchy. To test this idea, try the following experiment. Take a page from a document that contains visual cues—headings, subheadings, tables, and so on. Make a transparency of this document. In class, put this transparency on the overhead projector, and turn the focus knob so that the document is out of focus. Make sure no one can read the actual text but everyone can see the structure of the page. Ask your classmates to point out the main headings, subheadings, and areas that contain graphics. In class, discuss how people knew this information without being able to read the text.