Reading without Guidance

How many food items were you able to recall correctly? This is a tricky exercise for a number of reasons, and all of them relate to problems of ineffective writing.

• You were given no framework for understanding the list:
  • The instructions did not tell you to memorize the items, nor did they explain why you should read the list or how it was relevant to the course.
  • The items in the list were not grouped or ordered logically, so you had no way to organize the information.
• You were distracted by the two questions provided after the list, which were unrelated to the first part of the activity.