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.
Chapter 25 covered how design can be used to better inform and persuade. It’s hard to believe that design can actually be used to persuade. But seriously, if you look around you in your daily life persuasion through design is all around you! Just today I saw some kind of PETA commercial that effectively used some dramatic images to persuade how someone feels about animal rights. Now I know we’re not so concerned about writing instructions that are persuasive. If someone is reading instructions its usually for informative reasons, and not necessarily to entertain their own beliefs attitudes and values. So by taking some of the tips on layouts, graphics, colors, and other techniques into consideration I hope to make my document more informative. Layouts should be logical to the nature of your document. For example, my instructions require chronological steps. So why would I do anything other than write these in chronological order? Also, I’m going to try and pay close attention to effectively using my whitespace. I found out about the importance of this when I really started to examine my Resume in our previous project.
Chapter 25 dealt more with the actual documents that many professionals deal with in the business world. The chapter mainly outlines how to layout these specific documents, and align them. The proper layout can really make it easier on how quickly an audience member can find the appropriate information without having to struggle finding it. This seamless use of the document is what makes the proper design seem invisible. I hope to take advantage of the main principles (proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast) of this chapter in order to write a more efficient document. It never really occurred to me how subtle changes in proximity could actually change the way someone interprets your document. How close together or far apart elements are placed suggests a bond (or lack of) between otherwise unrelated parts. Unity can be created by using a third element to connect distant parts of a document. I plan on connecting things such as my titles, bodies, and graphics together in order to make things flow better and so the reader can ultimately make connections in the document easier.
The readings really opened my eyes as to how much we subliminally process when we read things. Whether this means actually reading text or just reading the layout of a document, it all goes through that little interpreter we call our brain and somehow gets processed to give us an opinion of the document and how effective it is. Hopefully by utilizing some of these techniques I can create a more effectively designed document.
We are persuading
As you look over Chapter 24 in TH, you need to expand your own definition of "persuasion." Your instructions are very much attempting to persuade: persuading users to follow your instructions, to use a technology in particular way, to avoid hazards or dangers, etc. You are, in the broadest sense of persuasion, trying to move your audience in a particular way: you want them to think a certain way and then behave in accordance with that thinking.
Note: Make sure you expand your discussion with specifics about how the readings can help us with our current project. For instance, when you write, "I plan on connecting things such as my titles, bodies, and graphics together in order to make things flow better and so the reader can ultimately make connections in the document easier," you should continue on in describing how you will connect them together using specific design elements. (This comment might be applicable here.)
Layout of instuctions.
You prove a good point when you discuss how instructions are for informing people and not trying to persuade them. This means your instructions may not need to be quite as flashy and nice looking as something with the main purpose of persuading people to take a particular action. I believe that most of the instructions written in this project will be in chronological order liked you talked about because that is how instructions are written 99.9% of the time. I also found that chapter 25 gave some useful knowledge in terms of the physical layout and structure of these instructions. Having a nice, neat, organized layout makes it much easier to read these documents effectively.
Instructions and Action
I would remake the point I make above: I would argue that our instructions are very much about, to borrow Bobby's language, "persuading people to take a particular action." If we act as if we are only informing people, we hide the fact that we are also suggesting how people should act. For instance, a set of instructions for a chainsaw does more than tell the user about the chainsaw: it argues that the user should use the chainsaw (to act) in particular way. This is an ethical concern as well: because we are suggesting patterns of behavior we are responsible (and, as several posts have suggested, liable) for how people act when they follow our instructions.