The Psychology of Quality and More

C Style: Standards and Guidelines (contents)

CHAPTER 2 : Psychological Factors

PART 1 : BASICS

CHAPTER 2 : Psychological Factors

2.1 Pattern Recognition
2.2 Filtering
2.3 Habit
2.4 Redundancy
2.5 Cues and Context
2.6 Recognizing Basic features
2.7 Short Term, Working and Long Term memory
2.8 Chunking
2.9 The Rule of Seven
2.10 Context Switching
2.11 Modifying the image
2.12 Memorizing sounds
2.13 Eye focus
2.14 Eye movement
2.15 Looking ahead
2.16 Looking back
2.17 The subconscious is always right
2.18 Natural ambition
2.19 Summary

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2.16 Looking back

When we reading something, particularly for the first time, and especially if we are trying to understand or learn it, we don't just read it once. We continually skip back and re-read chunks, particularly the difficult bits. There are flags in the written language to allow us to find the start of chunks, even when looking backwards. The capital at the start of a sentence helps. Splitting the text into paragraphs, with the first word indented, help too.

The programming equivalent is to make the start of the statement group, block or function easier to find, by using white space, braces or comment blocks.

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