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.
One thing I did agree with from the book was using visuals to enlighten the reader. Adding visuals to documents is an excellent way to display certain types of information, such as lists or results. When written in paragraph form, they may be difficult to comprehend, but using graphs or tables will clean up the document and allow the reader to easily find the data. Including pictures can make a document more interesting to readers. Pictures are a way to provide visual data for your topic, as well as a way to provoke more thought. Adding some white space between these visuals and the text is a very important part. White space separates the visuals from the text allowing easier comprehension as well as contrast.
I found the Instructor Blog to be very helpful from its information to the way it directed my eyes. At first I was pulled away by the bold lettering, quickly skimming over all of them, but when I went back and read the blog I took my time over these areas. The biggest one is quality five: “good design requires careful attention.” Paying close attention during and especially after completion will help the other four qualities fall into place. Being aware of what you’re writing and for whom you are writing for is a big part of the design as well.
Dig Deeper
Make sure you turn your discussion to specifics about how the readings can help us with our current project. (This comment might be applicable here.)
Thomson Hand Book no good?
I agree with your point of view on the Thomson Handbook. It isn’t the most interesting and entertaining book I’ve ever read but o well I guess it will have to make due. I hate how there is usually the main bulk of the reading on the outer parts of the pages then examples floating around in the main central area of the page. Like you pointed out, graphs and charts may clutter a page but you can get a great deal of information out of them in a short amount of time. A lot of time it is a lot easier than reading a huge paragraph that contains a lot of extras you don’t necessarily need to read.
Design
Breal, I would have to agree with you about the design and layout of the Thompson Handbook. When I was reading the chapters I could not tell which paragraph lead to which and could not focus on what I was reading. Pretty much the only thing that helped me get through the reading where the visuals and tables in the middle. They did a good job of getting the main point across that the paragraphs were trying to do in a sloppy fashion.
After reading through these chapters in the book it is even more apparent to me how important a good design is and that a bad design can cause the reader to become disinterested.
Thompson Handbook.. eww
I'm going to follow along with this slaughtering of the Thompson Handbook. I agree that, at least these chapters, were very difficult to read because of the shear magnitude of distractions plastered all over every page. It felt more like trying to read a coloring book than a university level text. Personally, I thought these chapters, a kind of the entire book, were a great illustration of poor design. As noted in the readings, it doesn't take long at all (1/20th of a second) for the reader to establish some sort of relationship with a document based on design, and in this case the Thompson Handbook was an epic failure.
Evil Book
I always like trashing on a textbook so I have come to the right place. The whole book seems like it combined two books with the extra information on the sides. Also because of the books size they seemed to cram as much information as possible onto each page of the book. This makes it very hard to read as it is distracting. The visuals with arrows pointing to the graphics made the whole thing a giant mess. A bigger sized book would definitely solve these problems and I for one cannot wait to sell this book back to the bookstore.
focus!
It feels good to know that I’m not the only person that hates the Thompson Handbook. As you mention it’s really hard to stay focus in trying to read text in the book. In my opinion, I actually found it hard to locate the paragraph on some pages at first glance. The layout of putting the reading material on a small column on the side of the pages makes it hard to stay focus especially when there are diagrams right in front of you. I agree with nmhess when he said, “it really felt like reading a coloring book than a university level text book.” There was really too many colors in which it make it difficult to keep your eyes focus.