Chunking: a writing concept everyone should know
Understanding how to chunk properly is the very first thing every workplace writer should learn.
Understanding how to chunk properly is the very first thing every workplace writer should learn. Yet, for reasons I will go into in a future post, very few people are taught how to chunk or have ever heard of this concept.
So, let us take a first pass at this subject.
Definition
The word CHUNK is used in different ways in psychology and cognitive science. Here is an interesting (and easy-to-read) article on the many uses of the word: as a noun, as a verb, as deliberate practice, as unconscious mental operation.
For our purposes, you can think of a CHUNK as a single unit made up of many items. And you can think of CHUNKING as the practice of deliberately grouping several items so that they can be processed as a single idea.
Application to workplace writing
In writing, several sentences can be chunked into a single paragraph to yield a single idea; several paragraphs can be chunked into a single section to yield an even bigger idea; and several sections can be chunked into a document that yields a single main message.
For me, this insight came from Barbara Minto's excellent book laying out her pyramid principle, which teaches us to think of workplace writing as an exercise in effective chunking. In fact, her principle teaches us to think of a written document as a hierarchy of cleverly nested chunks: small chunks sitting inside larger chunks sitting inside the largest chunk; that is, paragraphs sitting inside sections sitting inside a document.
Minto's insight is a gamechanger for many writers. It means that if you have learned how to chunk, you have learned how to build the various parts of a document as well as the document itself. It means that you can quickly get yourself a sound structure in which you can work on the parts of writing that we are typically taught more about, such as improving sentence style, language, tone etc.
Purpose of chunking
To chunk effectively, we need to understand the purpose of chunking: why chunk at all? The answer is quite simple: we do it to help readers better process the information they are receiving as they receive it, and to better recall it later.
Human brains need all the help they can get when it comes to processing streams of information. According to an influential 1950s paper by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller, the human working memory is quite constrained. It can hold only seven items plus or minus two.
Chunking, Miller explains, is a way around this limitation: collecting several items that for some logical reason belong together and filing them as a single chunk, effectively compresses the amount of information that must be processed.
The compression works like this: When there is a good reason for grouping a particular set of items together, the name of the chunk automatically triggers recall of many, if not all, of the items in it. For example, the name "breakfast" can easily trigger recall of many items like "pancakes, eggs, milk, cereal, and orange juice." So, even if we can still only hold seven "items" plus or minus two in our working memories, if each item is the name of a chunk, it carries within itself several items of its own.
The problem with chunks created by subject experts
For chunking to achieve its purpose, there must be some logical reason that the items being grouped together actually belong together.
This brings us to a main challenge of expert writing: when a subject expert is drafting on autopilot, the chunks she creates are not necessarily logical to her readers. That is, she may know the reason she is grouping certain things together, but her readers do not know this reason and often cannot guess it.
Most expert writers do not do this to make things difficult for their readers. (Although, I do remember one belligerent gentleman coming into writing class and yelling, "But if I don't make it hard for my readers, how will they know I am intelligent!!!")
Usually, it just happens because expert writers know things their readers do not know and have experienced things their readers have not experienced. They have established logical links between items that their readers have not, and so they see things as belonging together when readers do not; thus, the chunks they naturally create are not naturally meaningful to their readers.
How to create chunks that are coherent for readers
When it comes to workplace writing, there is one simple principle for chunking: when you group items together, there must be a logical reason for doing so and most readers should be able to articulate this reason. When this is the case, you have a coherent chunk.
Let us start with a simple example. A chunk made up of the items 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 is coherent because most people can articulate the reason these items belong together: they are all odd numbers between 0 and 10. But a chunk made up of the items Umbrella, Gorgonzola, Ficus, 72.8, Slovenia is not coherent to most people as they cannot articulate the reason these items belong together.
And now let us move on to a more complex example: a whole paragraph. By Minto's principle, a paragraph should be a coherent chunk. So, can you articulate the reason that *these* particular sentences have been grouped into a single paragraph?1
The health plan must take state and federal legislation into account when choosing its providers. Many states have implemented Any Willing Provider laws which prohibit health insurers from excluding qualified health care providers that are willing to accept the plans’ terms and conditions. However, these regulations have been argued to remove the benefits of managed care, since they prevent plans from trading volume for lower provider prices. Perhaps for this reason they apply to hospitals in only seven states (in other areas they are largely limited to pharmacies). I have data covering two markets within these states; I find that plans are just as likely to exclude hospitals in these markets as elsewhere. I therefore assume that these regulations have no impact on plan decisions in the markets I consider. In addition, some states have implemented Essential Community Provider laws, which require insurers to contract with providers that offer "essential community services", such as public hospitals and teaching hospitals, and to contract with enough hospitals to serve the needs of the local population. I assume these regulations do not affect the decision of a plan to exclude any particular hospital since consumer demand forecasts would prevent it from dropping too many hospitals in any case.
For most readers, even looking at such a large chunk of text is daunting—and coming up with the reason that *these* particular items have been grouped together is nearly impossible. This is because most readers are not experts on this topic—at least not to the same degree as the writer—and they were not with the writer throughout the research journey. So, they do not see this chunk as being coherent.
Something to try right now
What we have covered so far is a basic requirement for chunks: that they should, at the minimum, be coherent from the perspective of readers. In other words, readers should be able to articulate why the items grouped together have been grouped together.
In the future, we will go into further requirements, which lead to more or less compelling arguments.
But for now, look for a large chunk of text in your writing. An extra-long paragraph is a good place to start. Show it to a reader and ask whether they can articulate the reason that *these* particular sentences have been grouped together. If they can easily do it, excellent! If not, well then too, congratulations—you have identified a paragraph that is not yet coherent. And catching incoherence early is a great thing.
OK, that's all I will say about chunking for now. There is a lot more to chunking that we can go into later. It is a concept that I think is relevant for outcomes: it matters for how well readers understand a written piece, which, when the playing field is even, affects things like jobs, promotions, tenure, grants, and impact. So, let's talk more about it down the road.
I have taken this sample paragraph from a working paper version of an article. The paragraph was not in the final version of the article published in the American Economic Review (a great revision by the author!).