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The purpose of this paper is to consider the structure of entertainment media as a possible foundation for measuring aspects of visual presentations that could enhance or interfere with audience engagement.

Factors that might account for the large number of negative comments about visual presentations are identified and a method of calculating entropy measurements for form attributes of presentations is introduced.

Entropy calculations provide a numerical measure of structural elements that account for engagement or distraction. A set of peer evaluations of educational presentations is used to calibrate a distraction factor algorithm.

Distraction as a consequence of document structure might enable engineering of a balance between document structure and content in document formats not yet explored by mechanical entropy calculations.

Mathematical calculations of structural elements (form attributes) support what multimedia presentation viewers have been observing for years (documented in numerous journals and newspapers from education to business to military fields): engineering PowerPoint presentations necessarily involves attention to engagement vs distraction in the audience.

Exploring aspects of document structures has been demonstrated to calibrate viewer perceptions to calculated measurements in moving image documents, and now in images and multimedia presentation documents extending Claude Shannon's early work communication channels and James Watt and Robert Krull's work on television programming.

This paper seeks to urge academic writers to restructure their scholarly writing to reflect the depth of their intellectual message rather than conforming to the structurally simplistic hegemony of the mundane.

The authors of this paper represent interdisciplinary perspectives in research. Each has grown increasingly disillusioned by dwindling consideration given to the structural integrity of scholarly thoughts in academic writing. This paper does not suggest a solution of strict adherence to some style manual or single format, nor does it suggest a privilege to any particular constraint. Indeed, the authors suggest that the digital environment enables unimagined communication possibilities, and hence a counterpoise to any single rigid structure. New formats require attention to the engineering of message structure. Using historical examples and modern applications from their disciplines, the authors offer provocations on the structures of scholarly writing. They pay particular attention to modern applications of Claude Shannon's information theory and to the introduction of models for understanding the audiences of academic writing.

Scholarly writing warrants a deep investment of intellectual, personal, and communicative effort. Readers will have different requirements for any individual piece of scholarly writing, but all will be served by the fullest expression of the logic, care, tenacity, and passion that drove the research to fruition. Engineering the scholarly document to contribute to audiences of differing interests and abilities requires careful consideration rather than mere assumption of a generic reader.

Research for this paper yielded few preceding studies that considered document structures for scholarship. Authors of this paper intend to provoke academes to engage in active and intentional reconsiderations of how they choose to say what they have to say, by following the presented examples of writing and tools for measuring structural elements of documents.