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last.updated 3.12.06

Document Design

Purpose

The way an writer designs a document significantly influences the way the audience receives this content. Choices, such as combining text with images, the placement of text and images, the font face and the font style we choose, the writer makes can help or hinder how successfully s/he delivers her/his argument. We will discuss how these design choices are often a negotiation between individual argument, genre convention, and institutional convention.

Discussion–Kinross

We will address the following questions...

• What questions do you have about Kinross's article?
• Going back to the first day of class, what is rhetoric? and what are the three types of appeals?
• With this foundation, what then is the rhetoric of neutrality that Kinross describes?
• Based upon what you learned doing your genre analysis what are the document design conventions for the documents that you examine? How are these conventions influenced by the disciplines they written within?

Discussion–Bear

We will address the following questions...

• What questions do you have about Bear's version of document design principles?
• We will discuss the definitions of the following principles. Be prepared to explain the purpose of the principle and provide examples of each.
  • alignment
  • consistency/repetition
  • contrast
  • proximity
  • white space
• Can/should you violate these document design principles in the academic and professional contexts that you write within? Explain.
  

Activity–Genre & Templates

You will be divided into four groups to closely study one of the following documents:

• Dots Memo
• Modern Cover Letter
• Smoke Detectors are Life Protectors
• Getting to School Safely

As a group address the following questions together:

• What is the argument of the document?
• How did the writer design this document? Use Bear's document design principles to give you a vocabulary for talking about the design?
• Is this an effective design for its argument? for its discipline? explain. What revisions would you make to produce a more effective document?

You will work in groups with people at your site (or by yourself, if there is no one else at your site) for about twenty minutes. Each group should be prepared to give a 5-7 minute report about what they learned from the document they studied?