Study Strategies Creating Visuals As Mark’s use of visuals in his work as an ophthalmologist suggests, visuals have enormous power when it comes to presenting complex information in a clear, organized way. Creating a sketch or a graph is a great approach when you are stuck on a math problem: Your visual may allow you to “see” a solution that has eluded you before. In addition, visuals are an essential tool when you are presenting information to others, in a classroom or a conference room. Charts, graphs, slides, and the like can help you make your points vividly and powerfully. The skills below will help you in creating effective visuals, either for your own personal use or to share with an audience. • Determine the overall goal of your visual. Do you want to fi nd an approach to a math problem? Do you want to bring numbers to life as part of a presentation? • Decide the specifi c type of visual you will use. Some numbers, such as changes over time, are best communicated in the form of a line graph. Other sets of data are best seen in a bar chart, in a sketch, and so on. • Gather the tools you will need to make your visual: a pen, ruler, protractor, compass, and so on, if you are making your sketch by hand, or the software you will use if you are creating your visual electronically. • Take your time creating the visual, ensuring that it is neat and accurate. • Be sure to label all the major parts of your visual, paying special attention to units (inches, miles, tons, etc.). • If you are presenting your visual to others, make sure it is large enough to be visible to the whole audience and that it has a title. • If you are creating your visual from a math word problem, ensure that your visual includes all the key elements you will need to solve the problem. • Consider whether your visual accurately represents the material on which it is based. • Imagine that your visual was created by a friend or classmate. What suggestions might you make to improve it? • Consider whether a different form of visual would be more effective. For instance, did you use a bar graph when the material might have been better illustrated as a pie chart? • Ask yourself what new insights your visual offers you. What do you know about the material that you perhaps did not recognize before? www.mhhe.com/messersmith CHAPTER 10 Quadratic Equations 603
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