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| Graphic Communication |
Today I taught basic speech organization for the last time. This is always one of the toughest aspects of public speaking for me to teach because I literally cannot remember a time when I wasn't able to put smaller ideas inside of larger ideas. I don't understand minds which are not able to organize ideas in hierarchical and outlined fashion. Nevertheless, I do my best to get across the concept of how this basic form of organization works and turn to an old metaphor, the Organization Tree.
I'm sure this idea arises from the teaching of rhetoric in the Middle Ages. I seem to remember seeing an organizational tree form on the door of a colleague some years ago. Today I asked Professor Google to find that illustration for me but, sadly, I couldn't track it down. I did, however, discover that
Manuel Lima, author of
Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has a new book out called
The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, in which he provides a history of the use of the tree as a visual metaphor for various kinds of information.
Allison Meier provides a review of Lima's book at HyperAllegic complete with several illustrations (see one below).
So, I feel like my little tree is part of a vast and branching history of visual rhetoric.
Nevertheless, I'm not sorry to say good-bye to it.
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