READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 1

TECHNIQUES IN SELECTING
AND ORGANIZING
INFORMATION
Course Material No. 2

Ms. Jezreel B. Pangilinan

Subject Teacher
 READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 2

SELECTING & ORGANIZING

INFORMATION 2
WHAT’S INSIDE LEARNING OUTCOMES
THIS COURSE
MATERIAL?
At the end of the learning session, you must be able
to:
LESSON OUTLINE
• identify the different techniques in selecting
• Techniques in Selecting
and Organizing and organizing information;
Information • use any of these techniques in organizing

o Brainstorming List and selecting information; and

• apply these techniques to achieve a
o Graphic Organizer
particular purpose.
o Topic Outline

o Sentence Outline

RESOURCES NEEDED

PERFORMANCE STANDARD For this lesson, you would need the following
resources:
The learner critiques a chosen
• Selecting and Organizing Information PPT
sample of each pattern of
development focusing on
• Course Material, Microsoft Teams
information selection,
organization, and development.

CONTENT STANDARD

The learner realizes that

information in a written text may
be selected and organized to
achieve a particular purpose.
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 3

Dear Reader,
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Welcome to yet another year of wrestling with texts and
trying to make sense of them. In as much as there are a lot of
ambiguities in texts (as there are in the world which reflects
them, or the world which they make), certain facts are still
intact, as my teacher would say. And one of those facts is 5 Brainstorming List

that, no matter how hard it may seem or how basic that your
eyes just roll at the obviousness of it all, your reading and
writing skills are of paramount importance. Especially now.
7 Anong Ambag Mo?

Among other things, this course will help you do the

following:
create written outputs that convey relevance and
responsibility in handling and disseminating 8 Graphic Organizers
information
utilize knowledge of text and context in developing
conscientious decisions whether done individually or
as a group 14 Sort Em Out

effectively communicate through writing using the

different platforms of Information
and Communications Technology
judiciously select and logically organize information 18 Lesson Summary
into a written text to achieve a particular purpose
demonstrate understanding and appreciation of the
text as culturally produced and determined.
engage in reading and writing activities that feature 19 References
and promote harmony, unity, and love of country.
translate and interpret reading texts into written
contexts realistic and applicable to the call of the
present times and situations
situate the text correctly in the context in which it
was written and uses such knowledge to respond
appropriately
apply reading and writing skills to collaborate more
effectively in intercultural contexts
compose academic writing and professional
correspondence correctly and effectively
navigate textual and contextual situations effectively
by applying critical reading and writing skills in
dynamic ways

In other words, this course will help you deal with texts better:
to interpret better and ultimately, to create.

Let’s learn together!

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 4

In the previous lesson, we have managed to capitalize on

the fact that wherever we go, whatever we do, we can never get

away from a text. To be able to read and discern texts which you

need (as a student, as a member of the family, as a member of the

workforce), and want (as a friend, as a supporter of a particular

fandom, as a taxpayer) is as essential as breathing and eating.

These that we read we must transmit effectively as discourse,

which are cumulative snippets of information that we encounter

every day.

But with the plethora of information that we have right at

the palm of our hands (or rather, at the pixels of our TV, phone,

and computer screens), how do we actually determine those that

we need? And if we successfully do so, how do we put them in

their proper places, the way a school-age child would arrange

their toys?

This is why we need Techniques in Selecting and

Organizing Information. Techniques are approaches or methods

you as a writer may use to organize the information gathered to

accomplish your desired aim in writing and to improve writing

craft.

For us to systematize the means of selecting information,

we need to use some techniques that will help hold all our
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 5

Brainstorming
List
Originally used by the American businessman

Alex Osborn in 1953 as a strategy for his advertising

agents to pitch in highly innovative marketing plans,

brainstorming has made its way into classrooms, physical

or virtual, to throw in clusters of ideas, and select only

what are needed, as dictated by the situation which you

are in. As a matter of fact, it’s also a good “game” to play

of sorts during team-building activities at work, spiritual

retreats at school, and even sleepover parties in your

mutual social circles.

Contrary to what your teacher/party organizer

may have told you in the past, you can also brainstorm on

your own. Osborn (1953) calls it simply, individual

brainstorming. This is done through the usage of a

brainstorming list. If you’re the kind of person who

processes information faster through textual means, then

just like the famed balladeer Barry Manilow likes to sing

it, this one’s for you.

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 6

Generally, a brainstorming list consists of two parts.

The first part is the problem that you are supposed to

brainstorm about, and the suggestions

(things/concepts/ideas that you wish to contribute to

alleviate the problem, if not solve it).

Always take note that you cannot solve the problem

head on by just giving concepts or ideas as it will still

have to be executed. Just like First Aiders say it when they

respond to a road accident, if you can’t heal the gaping

wound completely, you can at least “stop the bleeding”.

Strategies for brainstorming include cubing

(examining viewpoints), freewriting (writing unlimited,

uninhibited ideas about the topic), listing (listing things

associated with the topic), mapping (also called webbing

or clustering where you write down all ideas and map

their connections to each other), and researching

(discovering fact by investigation). KEY POINT

One of the most effective

ways to select the
information you need is
brainstorming especially if
you are loaded with a lot of
information from various
sources.
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 7

BRAINSTORMING LIST
The traffic situation at EDSA (Epifanio Delos
PROBLEM Santos Ave.) is a politician’s nightmare.

1. The MMDA (Metropolitan Manila Development

Authority) must improve their already-
implemented bicycle lanes, giving proper
regulations and providing traffic enforcers to call
out motorcyclists who may use the lanes to
overtake the bikers.

2. Give immediate transitionary modes of

transportation in the assigned bus terminals/bus
stops, so that commuters will not hail
SUGGESTIONS taxis/jeeps/TNVS in the middle of EDSA, which is
absolutely illegal (e.g. the BGC Bus service
catering to bus passengers alighting on the Ayala
Bus Stop to access other locations)

3. All bus operators must agree that bus travel

times must be on the dot, just like the Point-to-
Point (P2P) bus system. Buses must only unload
and load passengers on all bus stops for 2
minutes, then continue the journey until it reaches
the end destination.

Take note that you can write as many suggestions as

you can. Osborn (1953) is speaking to you: no matter how weird,

surreal, or exaggerated your suggestions may get, they are

totally valid. This is exactly what he meant with “storming the

brain”, in which the word brainstorming came from.

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 8

LEARNING ACTIVITY
1 ANONG AMBAG MO?

Task: Having the basic understanding of how (individual)

brainstorming works, you are now given a Brainstorming List with a
given problem. Your objective is to give a maximum of three (3)
suggestions for that problem. You are encouraged to elaborate your
suggestions, so they may be understood much better.

BRAINSTORMING LIST
Other sports such as football, amateur boxing,
and volleyball, are underfunded and
PROBLEM
underappreciated in a basketball-dominated
country such as the Philippines.
1. The sports-governing bodies in the country
must develop a stable grassroots program for
those who would like to delve into, improve on,
and succeed in other sports, so that the nation
may no longer hold on to the longstanding bias we
SUGGESTIONS have had with basketball, and be more open to the
honor we may achieve in excelling in other sports.
2.
3.
4.

Exhausting, huh? That means you have successfully created not only
a storm, but a super typhoon inside your head with the thoughts you
just laid out in the list above. Now, let’s create your “incident report”
by answering the following questions:
1. Which among the suggestions you presented do you think is
the most plausible to be executed/made into reality?
2. What were your considerations in giving these suggestions?
Did it come from:

a. Personal experiences?

b. Secondary sources (I read it in an article/heard

on the news personally)?

c. Tertiary sources (shared by a

friend/parent/teacher, then reflected on it on my
own)?

3. Share a situation from your answer on the previous question

that helped you build the suggestion you gave above.
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 9

Graphic
Organizers
When you were in your pre-school days, your teacher loved

to decorate your classroom with tables, charts, and illustrations

with words, numbers, and shapes inside them. Educational

psychologists such as Edgar Dale have long believed (and proven)

that when children are fed with information that are arranged in a

simpler, and visual, approach, they may understand such data

faster than when just giving them plain text, or even when listening

to someone with a monotonous voice. This is what your teacher

wanted to achieve with you and your classmates by filling the walls

with colorful stuff…

… and these “stuff” being pertained to are formally called

graphic organizers (GOs, hereafter). They are visual

representations of a structurally arranged set of discourse elements

(Wyson, 2018). To critically understand how these things work,

let’s chop the definition of GOs and extract the keywords:

o Visual representations, since they usually take the form of

tables, graphs, and charts, which stimulate the eyes;

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 10

o Structurally arranged, since GOs help you

compartmentalize the pool of data you have with you, make

them appeal to you and others; and

o Discourse elements, since only vital information should be

compartmentalized, as discussed in the previous Course

Material, and not much of the supporting details (we will

deal with these at a later CM).

From preschoolers to teenagers like you and even to grown-ups

like your teachers and other professionals and laborers, GOs are

handy to know and understand, and handier to utilize and

comprehend.

A graphic organizer is also known as a knowledge map, concept

map, story map, cognitive organizer, advance organizer, or concept

diagram. It is a pedagogical tool that uses visual symbols to express

knowledge and concepts through relationships between them. The

main purpose of a graphic organizer is to provide a visual aid to

facilitate learning and instruction.

The simplest and most widely utilized GO is the table.

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 11

Not that table. THAT table. (SOURCE: self-made meme)

Tables are highly versatile, whichever way you wish to use

it. From the simplest tasks of sorting a pool of data into similar

characteristics, to the more complicated ones like plotting a

sequence of events, tables are a good pick-me-up in organizing

data, and an effective and comprehensible one, too.

They are composed of columns and rows, where we fill out

specific information.

Say you wanted to get something at a restaurant you

usually patronize, and you observe that the server handed you a

menu which is arranged like this…

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 12

Appetizers Main courses Desserts

Bread Pasta Cakes and pastries
Chips (nachos, potato Steak Confectionery
crisps) Pork (sweets, candies)
Salad Chicken/Veal Ice cream (gelato,
Tea Seafoods and fish softserve, sherbet)
Soup Fruits

…so, if you’re in the mood for just a cold snack, you can simply

browse the “Desserts/Snacks” section of the tabular menu

(placed on the “table”) and look for that cold snack you’ve been

craving for.

You may have also observed that the Brainstorming List

that you just filled in the previous activity took the form of a
KEY POINT
table. See what I mean with “versatile”?
A graphic organizer is a
Although tables are well and good for a beginner, they are teaching and learning
tool that is used to
organize information
not the only GO out there. We don’t want a one-hit wonder, do
and ideas in a way that
is easy to comprehend
we? The following are other types of GOs.
and internalize.

• Venn diagram – used to compare and contrast ideas. It is

one of the most commonly-used GOs used to display

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 13

comparison and contrasts of two (or more) sets of data,

which in our case, take the form of concepts, theories, and

facts.

Again, when we talk about comparison, we are actually

talking about similarities of the two sets of data being scrutinized.

Therefore, it’s not correct to tell your friend to “compare

algebra and trigonometry”, then point out their differences.

On the other hand, if we wish to point out the differences

of the sets of data given to us, the proper term to use is contrast.
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 14

• Cause and effect (fishbone diagram) – a graphical tool

for displaying a list of causes associated with a specific

effect.

• Cycle – describes how a series of events interact as a set

of results repeatedly.

• Concept map – depicts suggested relationships between

concepts. It is a graphical tool that instructional designers,

engineers, technical writers, and others use to organize and

structure knowledge.
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 15

• Flow chart – used to show chronology of events in a

narrative or stages in a process.

• Plot diagram – used to map events in the story and GOAL CHECK
analyze major parts of the plot Check this video from Visme
(2019) for fifteen (15) more
commonly-used GOs, some of
which we’re going to use in
future CMs, and even in other
courses throughout your
Senior High School career,
such as in Practical Research
courses. Make sure to pay
attention to them!
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 16
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 17

LEARNING ACTIVITY
2 SORT EM OUT

Task: Here’s an article from WallStreetMojo (n.d.) to help us settle differences

and identify similarities between Entrepreneur and Management. Your objective
is to translate the article into a Venn Diagram

ENTREPRENEUR MANAGEMENT

At this point, we can understand that comparing and contrasting two

or more things are helpful, especially if executed properly.

READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 18

LESSON SUMMARY

• What are the different ways of selecting and organizing information?

o The different ways of selecting and organizing information
are brainstorming, using graphic organizers, and outlining
(sentence and topic outline).

• What are the different types of graphic organizer?

o There are many. You can have a table, a Venn diagram, a

fishbone diagram, cycle, concept map, flow chart, and plot
diagram, among others.

• How will these techniques help achieve a particular purpose?

o Using these techniques will help the academic writer make

an easier job out of the written texts they have to make.

KEY TERMS

Brainstorming Concept map Cycle Fishbone Diagram

Flowchart Graphic Organizer Outlining Plot diagram

Sentence Outline Topic Outline

Venn diagram
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 19

REFERENCES

• Carroll, A. (2019, November 5). "No Russian.": A Decade On Does modern Warfare 2

Still Shock And Awe? Retrieved from HeadStartGaming:

https://www.headstuff.org/entertainment/gaming/no-russian-modern-warfare-2/

• Constantino, C. & Menoy, J.(2016). Reading and Writing Skills. Mandaluyong City:

Books, ATBP.

• Engracia, J., Dayao, H., Vizconde, C. (2017). Reading and Writing in the Academe and

Workplace. Quezon City: ABIVA Publishing House, Inc.

• Fleming, L. (n.d.). Practice with Outlining. Retrieved from Laraine Fleming:

http://www.laflemm.com/reso/OutliningFill-InREVISED.pdf

• MacMillan, F. (2018, November 8). VAK learning styles: what are they and what do they

mean? Retrieved from Engage Education: https://engage-education.com/aus/blog/vak-

learning-styleswhat-are-they-and-what-do-they-mean/#!

• Osborn, A. F. (1953). Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative

Problem Solving. New York: Scribner.

• Purdue University. (n.d.). Types of Outlines and Samples. Retrieved from Purdue Online

Writing Library (OWL):

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/developing_an_outline/

types_of_outlines.html

• Visme. (2019, December 19). 15 Creative Graphic Organizer Types to Visualize Your

Content. Maryland, USA. Retrieved July 18, 2020, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSDVRHQYZfA&feature=youtu.be
READING AND WRITING SKILLS • NU LAGUNA 20

• Wonderopolis. (n.d.). What's the Difference Between an Architect and an Engineer?

Retrieved from Wonderopolis: https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/whats-the-difference-

between-an-architect-and-an-engineer

• Wyson, J. (2018). English for Academic and Professional Purposes. Quezon City: Phoenix

Publishing House.