3. DOCUMENT DESIGN
3.1 KEY CONCEPT: Readability
Suzan Last
All documents have a purpose—to persuade, to inform, to instruct, to entertain—but the first and foremost purpose of any document is to be read. Choosing effective document design enhances the readability or usability of your document so that the target audience is more likely to get the message you want them to receive, and your document is more likely to achieve your intended purpose.
Choose document design elements that make your document “user friendly” for the target audience. Keep in mind that people do not read technical writing for pleasure; they read it because they have to; it’s part of their job. And since “time is money,” the longer it takes to read the document, the higher the “cost.” Your job as the document designer is to make their reading process as easy, clear, useful and efficient as possible by using all the tools at your disposal.
Designing a document is like designing anything else: you must define your purpose (the goals and objectives you hope your document achieves, as well as the constraints — such as word count and format — that you must abide by), understand your audience (who will read this document and why), and choose design features that will best achieve your purpose and best suite the target audience. In essence, you must understand the Rhetorical Situation (see Chapter 1.3) in which you find yourself: Who is communicating with whom about what and why? What kind of document design and formatting can help you most effectively convey the desired message to that audience? You want to use the most effective rhetorical strategies at your disposal; document design is one of those strategies.
Genres and Conventions
As you learned in previous writing classes, readers in different contexts expect different textual features, depending on the type of document they are reading and their purpose. A reader of an online editorial can expect strongly worded arguments that may rely on inflammatory emotional language, but not be backed up with much empirical evidence; we do not expect an online editorial to cite reliable sources in a scholarly format. In contrast, an academic reader expects the opposite: neutral, unemotional language, and plenty of empirical evidence to logically and validly support claims, with sources cited and documented in an appropriately academic bibliographical formats. These are some of the conventional expectations of the genres.
It’s not only the content and rhetorical strategies that have differing conventions; documents also differ in how they are designed and formatted. All genres of writing adhere to certain conventions, in terms of content, the style of language used to express that content, and how the content is presented visually. If you look at an online news article (or an article in an actual newspaper), you will often notice consistent formatting features.
- Large headlines, often using rhyme, alliteration, exaggeration or some other