"Natural" order

Is the information in Writing in a Visual Age as “easy to find” as promised? To answer this question, I attempted to use the text to answer a question about how to approach a writing task for “another college course”. Specifically, I tried to use the text to determine how to develop an overarching theme for my textbook review. Since “reviews” are not included as a form of academic writing, I first had to determine whether my review is more like an “evaluation” (p.262) or a “report” as a form of college writing how do I develop an overarching theme in a review? (p. 103). According to the text, evaluations are evaluative: “Is the thing—a product, for example, or an idea, a movie or a policy—good or bad?” (p.262). Evaluations answer an overarching question of value such as “is the thing as good as it promises” by comparing the thing to a set “source of criteria” (p.263); while positive and negative textbook reviews do exist, most reviews in composition in rhetoric (such as Rader’s review of Composition, Visual Culture and Problems of Class in College English and Prensky’s “Escape from the planet jar-gon” in (cite) are descriptive and exploratory, and tend to reserve judgment. Evaluation section covers questions of value and criteria. If my review is a report, however, it should convey “information that readers will find accurate, credible and reasonable comprehensive” (103): a report writer might identify a number of “themes” (p.160) but this section contains no discussion of how to develop an overarching idea. In practice, the color-coded boxes are difficult to search out of context: the boxes (which occur “throughout” each chapter) are not indexed; I have trouble determining if the task of “developing a controlling idea” is a strategy (green box) or a practical step (yellow box), and even if I could, the yellow and green colors are similar enough that it is hard to visually discriminate between the two categories of boxes. In the evaluative language of an evaluation, the "intuitive" mapping is not always "as good as it promises".