Make Yourself Clear

6Leveraging Momentum and Context

The format we have chosen to deliver this section's topic is fraught with irony. We are going to teach you about immediacy in one of the least immediate formats currently available: a book. To compensate, we will offer some format experiments to promote active learning as you read. A good teacher might refer to using devices such as note‐taking templates or mind maps. Their goal in using such instruments is to make thinking visible. Having thought through where our lesson could go wrong for our learners, our goal is similar: to help you see and surface your thinking at the times when such a practice will, hopefully, be most valuable to you. With all of that off our chests, this somewhat winding road of a paragraph leads to our opening analogy.

There's a road on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington, that is one of the most dangerous and exciting roads that we have ever seen. It essentially winds down toward the water and has room for one car, or to be more precise, about 96% of one car. As you are driving down it, you feel as though part of your car is hanging off the cliff. You are descending through steep curves, and it is beautiful when you catch a glimpse of the water, but…at some point, you realize that there are no one‐way signs and that the narrow road is actually a regular, two‐way road. Cars go down toward the houses at the bottom, and cars go up toward the bustle of commerce and entertainment or the ferry to Seattle, a center ...