Reading Response Week 6
Before reading the book I thought it would be pretty simple to just throw all the required information on a sheet of paper in a good order; however, after reading the book there is much more to this. It is important to have relationships between the images and the surrounding text. The words, images, color, data can appeal to readers. Good chart that lays out the visual form and the functions of each. The book includes a good project checklist that lays our rules for integrating images and tables into text. I plan on using this to help out with our project.
The book also spoke about how to mix up your sentence types. It gave examples of different types of sentence structures. Different sentence openings such as phrases, subject and conjunctive adverbs allow for a smooth read. I think our writing is good and has good conciseness. This can still use some review but I think we stay away from word unnecessary phrases. I think we still need to consider some variety in our sentences.
It is very important for us to be able to reach our audience with our brochure. Our audience is those who might volunteer or make some sort of donation to the community family resource center (CFRC). I think we do a good job in reaching this audience by explaining what the CFRC is and how you can help. I think we could use some additional help in persuading the people to help. Currently we explain how but I am unsure if we convince people to spend their time. The design is a trifold design that I think has a good feel to it. This provides a good break up of different things and allows us to organize well. I also think this is a typical design and the audience would be use to this shape.
As of so far we haven’t put to much thought into colors and pictures. Our goal is to make our brochure more eye catching and stronger visually.
Comments
Comment
I really liked that you began this post using the word "relationship" to describe the different elements of a brochure like the one we have to create for this project. I think that the relationship between the words and pictures is very important, however the relationship between the reader and the meaning of the text and pictures is what speaks volumes about the work you have done. It sounds like your group is doing a fine job recognizing what you should and should not do in your next draft. You definitely seem to have a hold on the important concepts these two chapters have taught us. Great Job!
Reading Response Comment
I agree with you that we need help in persuading the audience to help. We explain what the CFRC does and what the Christmas Day Dinner is. We also explain the importance of volunteering and give alternatives if you can't volunteer your time. I think we also need to explain the importance of helping specifically at the CFRC and the Christmas Day Dinner. I agree that we need to make the brochure more eye catching with more pictures too. I also thought making a brochure would be pretty easy but I didn't realize all the design and layout principles that are required in making a great brochure. Our group already has more ideas on how to improve our brochure for our second draft and I think incorporating everyone's ideas as well as the principles from the book will help make our brochure more eye catching and persuasive to the reader.
Comment
I agree that are things that we need to focus on a little more. Persuasion is the key to getting volunteers to take part in the CFRC. We can do this by listing reasons how volunteering and donating can positively help others in need as well as the volunteers themselves. Another way that we can achieve more positive results from the audience is to put more emphasis on some of the principles mentioned in the two chapters in the Thomson Handbook. I think that we achieved a lot of the principles already, but we can add more to make a bigger impact on the brochure.
Comment
After reviewing our brochure after it was turned in, I also feel we would benefit from a better use of variety in our text. Since we all have different writing styles, our text is going to be all over the place, so it is important for each one of us to revise thoroughly. Instead of having the document look like it was obviously written by four people, we can make it look as if it was written by only one. I hadn't thought about it, but you are right I'm not sure either if we really gave a potential volunteer an incentive to help the Community and Family Resource Center. With our next draft we should take this into account. Also, I agree that we need to put more time into our color and picture selection to make it more appealing visually because how it seems as if it bombarded by text. After reading, it sounds as if our whole group has found areas in which we can improve.
Reply
I agree that at first it seems simple to put together a brochure and it does not seem like a lot of thought will have to go into making an effective brochure. After reading the text you realize that a lot of different aspects must be considered when trying to make a brochure that will catch and keep someone's attention. The relationship between images and text is a good point that I think sometimes many people look past the importance of. Being concise is important because people do not want to spend a lot of time reading a brochure. A lot of times they just browse through it to see if they are interested and then go into reading more detail. This also shows how appearance is very important with a brochure.
Comment
My group seems to have the same goal in mind as your group does. We, also, haven't put too much thought into the colors and pictures used in our brochure. Our first draft was mainly just the base design of our final draft. We still have a lot to discuss as far as the details of the design go. I definitely think it is very important that our brochures be eye-catching. Since we are trying to persuade our readers to donate or volunteer for the event, pictures would help us a lot. One of my group members mentioned the use of real pictures as an effective method of persuasion. I thought that was a good way of showing readers just how they would be helping.
Brochure
A agree that it was harder than I thought to make the brochure. When I first started working on it I thought it would be easy. I soon found out than in order to make all of the words flow together and the pictures to go with the words it took some work. I also had to refer to the book in order to change up the sentence structure and phrases. In my group we found that we had to focus strongly on keeping the right audience in mind when working on the brochure. We had to make sure to make it so that kids would be able to read and comprehend it and it had to have all the information needed.