"Top down" vs. "bottom up"

[Steve Owens <uso01 -at- EAGLE -dot- UNIDATA -dot- COM>]

> Top-down design in cognitive studies means that readers will attempt to
> use what comes first in the text to make sense of whatever follows. This
> phenomenon suggests that informative headings are important, as well as
> presenting the gist of the text quite early on. Some empirical studies of
> top-down and bottom-up processing (where the main ideas come after the
> details) show that often good readers can handle the lack of organising
> information as they read, but that this really throws poorer readers.

        I'm familiar with top-down and bottom-up design methodologies from
software design stuff, but a fellow tech writer (who's on this list, but
on vacation this week) introduced me to the phrase "cartesian logic" to
describe top-down organization.

> All this could be culture-specific as well. There's some informal
> evidence that Japanese techical manuals, for example, are arranged in a
> bottom-up style, mainly because there are different expectations about
> the readers' role. However, a colleague of mine who teaches in Japan
> tells the story of a Japanese engineering student who preferred the
> English-lang. textbook because of its logical organisation, despite
> having to read it in a foreign lang.

        I suspect that there are cultural biases for/against top-down
design in different aspects of a single culture as well as in
different cultures.  The example my fellow tech writer used was
comparing french legal documents to U.S. legal documents.  In the U.S,
legal documents are organized by straight-line logic: A, B, C, D, E,
etc.  In France, legal documents are organized by cartesian logic.  Of
course, I may be misremembering this, and I'm sure Jim will correct me
if he manages to spot this message amongst the other 600 waiting for
him when he returns :-)

Steven J. Owens
uso01 -at- unidata -dot- com