Module 3
Organizing Your Report: The Pyramid Outline

Click on the links below to go to that section of the module.

Using Different Patterns

Here is another example. Try to memorize the following 13-digit number:

3156189211224

See if this helps:

$3,156,189,211,224

Here is an alternative way of grouping:

3/15/6/18/9/21/12/24

Okay, this is the last clue. Will you remember the numbers now?    

Clock

In every case, you are still trying to remember a sequence of 13 digits. For most of us, however, this is beyond the limits of our short-term memories. We suffer from the condition of 7 plus or minus 2. According to George Miller, who first described this phenomenon in the late 1960s, most people can hold about seven items in their short-term memories. Some can only hold five; the lucky ones can hold nine. Seven seems to be the magic number. Our minds can’t hold more than that, unless we can group those items in a meaningful way to reduce their number.