Pulse literacy
Reading the quiet middle of a crash pulse
Most first drafts obsess over the tallest peak. Supervisors, though, often ask what happened between contacts — the stretch where the vehicle may have rotated, slid, or simply waited for the next bump. In Crash Impact Analytics we call that stretch the quiet middle.
A quiet middle is not empty. It can reveal whether a secondary contact was immediate or delayed, whether braking intervened, or whether the sensor simply rested while people argued at the scene. Labeling it forces the brief to admit sequence instead of stacking adjectives around the loudest spike.
A small practice
Before you write narrative color, mark the quiet middle in seconds. Note what evidence you lack. If photos arrive only after both peaks, say so. If ECU data shows a long flat line, resist inventing drama to fill the gap.
In the Crash Signal Field Lab, week one spends an entire critique circle on quiet middles because they expose leaps faster than any lecture on chart aesthetics.