3 . 3 Communications Views
"When the writer becomes the center of his attention, he becomes a nudnik. And a nudnik who believes he's profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik." -Isaac Bashevis Singer
First and foremost, a document is a tool to communicate information. The type of information will affect the type of communications. Different information types are entertainment, reference, scanning, mandatory versus optional, sales, friendly, and formal. Each information type has customary visual conventions. Used poorly or too often, they will cause your document to look like just more pieces of paper. Used judiciously and with imagination, they can be a valuable aid.
But ultimately, the content expressed in the document is what really matters. If the reader understands the content, your communication was successful.
Often the main trick to successful communication is getting the reader to pay attention. Look at some of your junk mail; innumerable attentiongetting devices will come into view. Colored stamps, fake telegrams, pop-ups, personalized names, metallized envelopes, and more are all attention grabbers.
In the domain of electronic documents, clip art collections of all sorts can help you draw attention to your documents. Clip art collections with all sorts of specialty images (see section Clip Art in the appendix Resources) from military symbols to biological parts to cartoons, can convey a message to the reader. Clip art and unimaginative attentiongetting devices can cut both ways, however.
Customizing the content of an article for a particular audience is a good way of improving communication. Of course, doing this is extremely difficult for largevolume publications, such as newspapers and magazines. One interesting technique used by the Washington Post (and others) is called zoning. The Post has a column called Dr. Gridlock that describes the trials and tribulations of travel in the Washington, D.C. area. The content of this column is modified for specific areas by the use of readers' addresses via delivery zones.
SCIENCE, POLITICS, and FOOD PYRAMID GRAPHICS
Although design doesn't mean everything, it can have important and even political impact. For instance, take the case of the food pyramid.
In April 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was going to publish a replacement of the basic four food groups wheel, a staple of classrooms since the 1950s. The idea was to increase the importance of grains, fruits, and vegetables and to reduce the importance of meat and dairy products, following more recently discovered good nutritional practices. As you might imagine, the beef and dairy lobbyists were not too happy about this turn of events. After a great deal of criticism, publication of the pyramid was halted. According to one nutritionist angered by the USDA reversal, "It was the visual that made the impact. That's what upset people; it clearly showed you should not have as much meats and dairy products as you should grains, fruits, and vegetableswhich is the truth."(15)
One year later (and $855,000 more), the USDA unveiled a refined pyramid and had more data supporting its case. In the end, good science won out, and the lobbyists had to live with the design of the food pyramid.(16) Now the Food Pyramid is a classroom staple and also appears on the packaging of many products in your supermarket.
3 . 3 . 1 Aid for Grammarless Writers
"A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity." -Edgar Allan Poe
As we examine ways in which technology can help in the communication of ideas, publishing systems can provide a number of tools to aid grammar. At times the technology of word processing and desktop publishing systems is more fun than writing. Integrated graphics with text, WYSIWYG displays, and font manipulations can divert the writer from the communications task at hand. In a Washington Post article titled "Does Technology Contribute to Bad Writing? Perhaps It Might Probably CouldOr NOT," Michael Schrage, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commented:
Indeed, some people argue that word processing technology makes the physical task of writing so much easier that some people toss self-discipline to the electrons and hedonistically indulge themselves by larding their prose with everything but the kitchen sink. Conversely, the "perfectionists" turn into digital Flauberts, writhing in agony over which comma should go where and if that semicolon is really the best way to go.
Some products, used judiciously, aid the process of writing correctly and with good grammar, but nothing can stop the rambling author from rambling with run-ons and going on and on and on.
Products such as RightWriter (Cue Software), Grammatik (Reference Software) and Correct Grammar (Lifetree Software) rate documents for readability. Grammar checker systems can generate reports about average sentence and paragraph length, the use of passive voice, the use of jargon, and other writing aspects. They also provide suggested changes. These packages use readability scores to rate the document as appropriate for a particular reading grade level.
A few readability indexes are widely recognized. Chief among these are the Flesch-Kincaid Score and the Fog Index. According to the RightWriter (a grammar checker) manual: (17)
The Flesch-Kincaid formula is the United States Government Department of Defense standard (DOD MIL-M-38784B). The government requires its use by contractors producing manuals for the armed services. The Readability Index is equivalent to the Overall Reading Grade Level (OGL) for the document.
Grade Level = (.39 x ASL) + (11.8 x ASW) - 15.59.
ASL = average sentence length (# of words /# of sentences).
ASW = average # of syllables/word (# of syllables /# of words).
A good range is 6-10.
AT&T sells a writing tool called WWB, the Writer's Workbench software, that runs under the UNIX operating system. It is an interesting collection of utilities that help analyze writing style and suggests changes to fix grammatical problems. It can look for problems with punctuation, sentence length, readability, split infinitives, and overall organization. WWB even has a utility to compare your language style with that of another document, facilitating consistency over large numbers of documents.
3 . 3 . 2 Random Writing Tools
Aside from the various grammatical aids previously mentioned, spelling checkers are certainly the most frequently used writing tool. Spell checkers vary from ones that simply list the words not found in a dictionary to ones that make suggested corrections. The better spell checkers can work with several dictionaries and may be able to use a general dictionary, a site-wide (organization) dictionary, one for a user, and one for the particular document.
Most of the widely used word processing packages provide or work with a built-in thesaurus. These are always useful when searching for that hardtothinkofword, utterance, expression, maxim, term, slogan, verbiage, declaration, idiom, phrase, remark, statement, comment, and so on.
One innovative writing tool introduced back in 1987 is the Microsoft Bookshelf. It was one of the first serious mass market CD-ROMs and was aimed at writers. The storage capacity of the CD-ROM enabled Bookshelf to contain 11 reference books and information data sets. Among these were The American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's II: Electronic Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Chicago Manual of Style, and the U.S. ZIP Code Directory. The combination of these reference materials in the context of a PC and a word processor is a powerful tool.
Budding poets can also be computerized. The "Rhymer" from WordPerfect Corporation is a rhyming dictionary available for use with WordPerfect on PCs. You can search for words by a number of phonetic characteristics. Act like a bloodhound and search for a sound; it will simply astound, not confound. Just imagine the possibilities of rhyming for searched quotes with words found in the thesaurus! Onward writersnow you have as many tools to abuse as graphic designers do!
