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Library | Material Type | Call Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Government Records | Book | P 95 .W87 1992 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Architect, graphic designer, consultant to industry, and purveyor of information packaging, Wurman now attempts to teach us how to teach and how to take teaching. Let it be a lesson to us all. After committing Information Anxiety (1988), a cluttered compendium of flashy formatting that produced just what the title promised, Wurman offers a bit more substance in this outing, but the product is still belabored. The text is an ultimately numbing amalgam of stray statistics, mild anecdotes, studies, rules, formulas, and conditions that might somehow prove of interest to some M.B.A.s. Buried within ``3 types of instruction,'' ``4 factors for instruction givers,'' ``5 basic components,'' and ``6 basic building blocks''--no lords a-leaping--are, to be sure, some pedagogical truths demonstrating that instructors don't listen, listeners don't hear, and all have private agendas with which to reckon. Wurman attributes the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal, as well as lots of other messes, to faulty instruction, and maybe he's right. But here there's a wealth of distracting page-layout, what with boxes, mixed typography, and more bullets (of a printer's kind) than were expended in Operation Desert Storm. Somewhat more interesting is a surfeit of marginalia, with an eclectic collection of quotes from Werner Heisenberg to Kahlil Gibran, Albert Einstein to Robert Pirsig. Wurman's style (in English, not to mention book decoration) is less felicitous, which makes the margins better reading than the text. Some substance submerged in a flood of format. (Line drawings.)
Booklist Review
Poor communication is blamed for myriad workplace ills, yet this explanation itself is less than specific and provides no real answer to the question of why things don't work. Wurman, an architect, graphic designer, and author of Information Anxiety (Doubleday, 1989), points out that more than half of all communication in~volves instructions. He argues that we no longer know how to take, give, or follow instructions. He offers this delightful, eclectic guide full of clues and tips on how to get others to understand what it is we want them to do and how we can understand what it is others want us to do. Although he sometimes doesn't follow his own best advice ("Focus on content, not form!"), Wurman proclaims a very important message. Highly recommended for personal and library collections. ~--David Rouse