English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

One of the best approaches is to use as many different techniques to convey meaning to the user as possible. The techniques involve arrangement of style of text, visual aids, plots, and photographs. I can certainly vouch for the importance of such techniques in my line of work: software engineering. Programs usually consist of millions of lines of cryptic looking code. Nobody can understand all that code without proper instructions. One example comes to mind:

http://alperdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/net-framework-35-types-an...

When reading something or listening to a visual presentation, my interest and comprehension are heavily determined by the design and layout of the visuals. Something that is poorly designed can be hard to understand and will not hold the attention of its readers *cough Thompson Handbook cough*.

Honestly, I think the Thompson Handbook is a mess. There is just way too much going on to stay focused on one thing at a time. Maybe that was a point of having us read those chapters though.

When I began looking the Thompson Handbook after reading Instructor Blog #5: Design, I couldn't help but begin to analyze the text using some of the qualities of design mentioned in the blog.

I actually found these readings useful, in contrast to a few previous readings... Chapter 24 gave me a few ideas for the graphics I plan on using for this project. After reading through the chapter I noticed that there were very few actual photographs; this reminded me of the commercials that use cartoonish figures in place of real actors. Someone had told me that they were cartoonish to give the non-intuitive effect of providing a sense of reality or validity. This makes much more sense now, I think.

Honestly, I never knew all that I just read about went into design. I usually just get some pictures, make some text with bold headings, slap the pictures in the text, and call it good. My roommate is a graphical design major, and I never understood what he did. He would always try to make things look so "pretty" while I would view the document as not having enough information. I think for a good design, two people with these contrasting mindsets should work together to form a great design.

This week’s readings outline what makes our design of our products more effective. As we have read our products are ultimately documents and there are many considerations that must go into effectively writing these documents. I was amazed at how design can influence readers in so many ways. Chapters 24 and 25 provided me with some new material that I will hopefully use in my writing to successfully use design and visual content in order to provide a more effective document that will ultimately make reading more “invisible” to the audience.

Designing my instructions is going to be a real task. I wouldn’t consider myself at all creatively inclined and I am a bit worried about my overall design skills. I have certainly learned some useful things from these chapters and from the instructor’s blog.

This week’s readings have given me some good insight into the creation of instructions. Overall Chapters 24 and 25 discussed different ways for creating effective layouts. This can be accomplished by taking aspects ranging from color to image placement, into consideration. As many people have pointed out so far, this is ironic because our book obviously did not follow the design suggestions.

The readings and instructor blog both did a fairly good job of pointing out the basic things to keep in mind while designing a document, such as alignment, repetition, proximity, and contrast. Although I think it could have gone into a little more depth as to what makes a good design. Saying things like alignment and spacing are important. And its true that if they are off, it will make for a poor design and many people will notice that something is "off" or "wrong" with the document.

The readings for this week gave me a lot of great ideas to use for my instructions project. One of the things that stuck with me most was properly using white space. I guess this is one of those things that I had always taken for granted. I know that in my own personal experience, if I didn't like the design of a document, chances are I would skip it unless I really had to read it. Whether it was instructions for assembling something, or reading people's resumes, if it wasn't visually appealing it didn't get read.