In Chapter 24 – Using Visuals to Inform and Persuade, the chapter talked about how pictures can help our writing documents.
From working on documents in the past I understand how important it is to add pictures to spice up your paper. The human brain can remember information better by associating it with pictures. This is why we must include pictures into our user manuals. Now what deems a picture to be important? Well for one it should relate directly your topic. In computer manuals it helps if the picture has important information. Commands, set up instructions, and pictures of how the system should look is all very important. It is also important to remember to not make your manual a slide show. An example of something that is not important is a picture with the mouse over the “Next” button. Wow, I needed a picture for that when a simple “Clicked ‘Next’” line would have been sufficient. As you can see pictures are a very powerful tool but with great power come great responsibility.
In Chapter 25 – Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design for Writers, it talks about how important the layout of your paper is. First off, make sure you make one large section heading and then smaller subheadings underneath that. When you split up your information will be separated and will be easy to look in a table of contents or an index. Another tip is to use bullet points. It is much easier to look at bullet point information rather than a wall of text. This is also helpful to make a hierarchy of instructions rather than a large numbered list. By the time you are done you will be at step 100 and that is just silly. It will take a bit of time to make an instructional document. It will just take practice and soon enough you can write a manual you will be proud of.
More than Sugar and Spice
Jeff, you write early in your response that pictures can "spice up your paper;" however, and as the rest of your response indicates, visuals (and design elements in general) do more than add spice. Rather than additional content, it is important to see visuals as part and parcel of the document itself. This may seem like a minor point, but is it important that we have visuals in mind as we compose. If wait until the end to "add" them, we risk having images that are not fully integrated into the form and function of our documents.
Note: be sure to add more specifics with respect to how you will apply the readings. Avoid summary in favor of concrete and specific application.
Pics are good.
Your title says it all! Pictures can make written instructions, or any other type of text for that matter, much better. I believe that when creating instructions, pictures are one of the most important aspects because you can see if you are actually doing things right by checking it with the picture. I also agree with the Spiderman line “with great power comes great responsibility”. Pictures help strengthen words but you don’t want them to take up all the space when simple words are sufficient. I thought chapter 25 did a good job explaining layout as well. Without proper layout your document can be very unpleasing to the eye and therefore not as useful. Like you said, these things take practice. I don’t think we will all create perfect sets of instructions on the first go around.
I like instructions with pictures :)
Yeah, I agree that pics are good. I don’t know how many times I have followed instructions and was lost with the wording they have used. With having a picture of a step or process, it clears up a lot of miscommunication. I personally like pictures; they seem to keep my interest more than reading a bunch of instructions. Like you say “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very true, you can’t always describe a process with words sometimes you have to show it.
Also with the point you make with having bullet points are great. I always dread reading a wall of instructions. My favorite instructions include both pictures and bullet points. I will be trying to use both these methods on my project.
Zebulon Rouse
Pictures
I think some of the best examples of how pictures are worth one-thousand words come from magazines. When you flip through a magazine there are many ads. Lots of those ads don’t even contain much text. I’ve seen quite a few that just say a handful of words including the company name and have a picture. I think as long as you have the right picture for your application it can explain more than you can do in text just from seeing it. When reading technical instructions it is so much easier to make sure you are doing the right thing when you see a picture of it.
-Chris