- [Instructor] Hello, readers. Today we're going to talk about quantitative information in texts, but I want to start with a question. What's the best way to describe the way a horse looks as it runs? What's the most efficient way? I guess I could just use words, right? The horse pushes off with its back legs and then its front legs come up, and as the horse propels itself forward, both its back and front
hooves are off the ground at the same time as it gallops. It's like a series of jumps. Listening to myself say that, it doesn't feel very clear to me. At least it's certainly less clear than this moving image
of a galloping horse. Sometimes the most efficient
way to express information is to present it visually, to see it in order to best understand it. And so we're going to talk
today about graphs and charts, your friends and mine. This video is no longer about horses. I apologize if I gave that impression. I did give a pretty obvious title when I said quantitative
information in texts. But to those of you who
I've misled, I'm sorry. Now, graphs are one of many ways we can make visual
representations of data, information you can see, news you can use. And I guess a question that
follows from that is why do it? Why make a graph and a chart? What does that have to do with writing? Well, visualizing data can
make an argument stronger. Let's say my neighborhood
is having a bake sale to raise money for, I
don't know, a carnival. And some of my neighbors
have peanut allergies, so I want to write to
the neighborhood council to say let's make sure
that the baked goods don't have peanuts in them
so the whole neighborhood can participate without fear
of having an allergic attack. That's supposed to be a peanut. I realize it kinda looks like a dog treat, but let's pretend that's a peanut. Now, good readers know
that data is important to informational text, so as a writer, I wanna make sure that I'm backing up my claims with a chart. Here's the text of the letter I'd send to my neighborhood council: Dear Neighborhood Council, I'm writing to ask that
you officially ban peanuts and tree nuts from the
baked goods on offer during our upcoming carnival bake sale. Over a fifth of residents surveyed reported some kind of food allergy. Please see attached graph. If we want to have
their full participation in this fundraiser, we cannot permit foods that will send them to the hospital. All my best, David. Now, let's take a look at that graph. These are made-up numbers
in a made-up situation. But let's say I interviewed
50 of my neighbors, and 40 of them here report no allergies, but 10 of them do. So we can have this bar graph that breaks down those allergies by type. One person is allergic to strawberries. Two people are allergic to peanuts. Four people are allergic to tree nuts, like pecans or walnuts. And three people have
multiple food allergies. And then we have this bar here that shows all the folks that
don't have food allergies. That's the other 40. To put it another way, here's a pie chart of that same data set
showing just how many people in the neighborhood
have allergies in total. It's just a different
way of looking at it. This is all the same data, but we can see that the
percentage of people surveyed who have allergies adds
up to 20% of the total. Something that's in the
letter but not the graphs is the idea that these are
very serious allergies. If the wrong person ate a peanut, they could have a medical emergency. If the council were to look
at just the graph alone, they might say, "Eh, it's
not that many people. "Peanuts are great, let's include them." But combined with the text,
the stakes become more clear. And they may better
understand the consequences of having nuts at the bake sale. And something that's in the
graph that isn't in the letter is the breakdown of allergies by type. Maybe the council could decide that the one person with
a strawberry allergy is an acceptable risk and
that strawberry baked goods are kind of obvious-looking
and easy to avoid in a way that brownies with
walnuts in them aren't. This visual information allows
the neighborhood council to get my point more efficiently
than just the words alone. It helps me express a
sort of complicated idea that peanuts and other
allergens in the bake sale might constitute too much
of a risk to my neighbors and that they shouldn't be allowed. Now, there are other questions like is this a representative data set? But that's a question that
can be better answered by our statistics course. For now, think about it this way. As a reader, your job is to look at everything that is on
the page, not just the text. Then think about what both
the data and the words do for your understanding. Data and informational
text are two great tastes that go great together. One can support the other and vice versa, you know, like chocolate
and peanut butter. Oh, no, sorry, bad example, like chocolate and sunflower butter. You know what I mean. You can learn anything, David out.