Did you ever come across a piece of writing that was uncluttered, did not hurt your brain, was easy to read and understand, and said all that was required in a logical and structured way? Most probably that piece of writing was information mapped. The writer was either aware of Information Mapping, or understood by intuition what the reader would like.
Information mapping is a way to analyze, organize and present information for any medium. This also includes articles that you write for your blogs. Three of my favorite principles of Information Mapping are chunking, relevance and labeling. Labeling is something that you may or may not do for a blog writing. Sometimes you do, sometimes you do not. But, I religiously apply the principles of chunking and relevance in my writing for my blog. I will explain chunking here.
Chunks are pieces of written prose. Information mapping says that a child is best able to understand a chunk with three pieces. So a child will easily understand, “I love you”, and with difficulty, “I am trying to say that I love you”. Ideally a chunk should not have more than nine pieces. This means not more than nine words in a sentence. Not more than nine sentences in a paragraph. And not more than nine paragraphs in an article or a chapter.
Especially for web writing, or writing for an online medium, you should not have more than 3-5 sentences in a paragraph. The number of words in a sentence can vary between 9-12, at the most fifteen. This is important as dense paragraphs on the screen strains the readers eyes. I have normally found that upto 10-12 sentences in a paragraph in books does not cause a strain on your brain.
In this article, I have used six paragraphs, with each not more than 3-5 sentences. I just explained chunking here, and that was the aim of this article. I have used this principle while writing this article. There are numerous articles on the web, which give an insight into structured writing.
Information Mapping is a trademark of Information Mapping Inc., and they are the sole authority on providing training on Information Mapping. Robert Horn and his colleagues are credited with the development of Information Mapping. You can find more information on Information Mapping here at WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_mapping.
Hope you liked this article. Thanks for your time.