week 6 reading response
Submitted by jgaffney on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 22:58.
Chapter 24 and 37 by today
Consider your draft of the project. In a reading response, explain how the principles of variety, conciseness, audience, and design are shaping your draft. Reference specifics in your document in your reading response.
I use variety several times in my draft of the poster. I do not use it in the sense of revising sentences so much, like chapter 37 talks about, as I do in the style (structure) of sentences. Chapter 37 does not really apply to a poster of this type in my opinion. Posters in general should not be too wordy, so while I made sure not to be over repetitive there was not a whole lot of room for variety outside of changing colors, fonts, and sizes of texts. Chapter 24 talks a little bit about grabbing someone's attention quickly the variety in my poster helps with that. For example, I color coded food, sponsors, and prizes into distinct categories that will hopefully make it easier to follow. I also tended to change font size, embolden it, or italicize it when I changed subject. At least that is what I was trying to do.
Conciseness was key to my poster. As I mentioned, posters cannot be too wordy otherwise they become too much to look at and take too much time for a reader to figure out what the poster is about. I tried to to keep all text as concise as possible. Most of my text is kept to one line at the most if not just a few words.
After just reading Tom's feedback about how no group truly focused on the audience, I have to admit I could have done that a little bit more. In my next draft I will focus primarily on the audience and try to emphasize the importance of this event for everyone. In my current draft, I mainly just advertise that "hey there is this event or whatever happening this December and what not". I feel I really need to focus on giving this event a purpose in my next draft.
Design is hard. I tried to make everything flow and be consistent with one another. However because there is the possibility that this will all be in black and white, I tried to make my poster be visually distinct even without color.
I did not finish the reading until after I completed my first draft. I plan on going back over the draft and really paying attention to what the book has to say when revising it.
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Comment
Jim,
I agree that I did not really finish reading these chapters until after completing the first draft. They were very insightful, and I plan on using them in this next revision. I do believe you did a good job with the poster’s conciseness and that is your main focus point. Conciseness is also something I plan on going back and focusing on. After reading Tom’s comments for the groups I noticed a commonality that the press release should be written at about 6th grade sentence structure. This is something that I was not thinking about at all when writing my press release, but I will now. I also noticed that we need to concentrate on the auction more as the main event. These are all capable changes that we can make for our next drafts.
Sheila
comment
I agree with you that posters should not be too wordy or people will lose interest, and you are right that there was not much to change about this poster outside of font or italics, but sometimes that’s all it takes to take a poster (or anything else for that matter) from boring to interesting. I agree with you also that for my next draft I need to think more about the audience as well. As I looked over my press release I can see a few points that might need to be changed in order to better suit the audience I am targeting.
Reply to Jim's reading response week 6
Hi Jim –
I agree that a poster should not be too wordy. People want to take a quick glance at a poster and get the information they are looking for. I think the color-coding for the food, sponsors and prizes will be beneficial. I hope that the client is able to produce this in color. I also think the large font is key to grabbing attention. I think as we do our revisions we might want to consider placing the words Silent Auction at the top and moving the Soup and Bread logo down. I believe we did a good job on our first draft and with some review of the chapters, further group discussion and feedback from the other group we will end up with some very nice documents for the Crisis Center.
I also feel that Chapter 37 did not have much to with the poster or the flyer. The press release is the document we need to review as a group and check to be sure it follows all of the principles of writing. I think Sheila has done a nice job with the press release and will be open to comments and suggestions for revision.
Kevin
comment
I also didn't focus enough on the audience, even though I may have thought I did, I didn't get across what I thought I was going to get across. And so I agree that's something we all need to look into. And I agree with you that chapter 37 really wasn't geared toward the poster or the flyer, i would say that it was more related to the press release if anything. And I've always realized that when I'm walking around on campus and see the flyers on the ground and they have to long of sentences or even just too many words on them I will completely ignore that its even there, because I don't have enough time when I'm walking to class to read a book on the ground. So I think you brought up a very good point about not making a flyer or poster to wordy, so that the audience will be more prone to read it.
Response
I agree with what you said about posters not being too wordy. I personally do not like to read lengthy flyers that really do not say anything of importance. My group also tried to minimize words while at the same time trying to maximize the impact it has on others. Varying sentence structure is another way to set your documents apart from the rest. The font sizes and colors tend to draw onlookers in, while the minimal text encourages readers to actually read a little through the documents. I think the points you brought up in this response are going to really benefit your drafts of the project.
response to Jimmy
Jim,
I think you did a good job with the poster. I like the way you use different colors to stress different things. I also agree with you that posters are not supposed to be too wordy since most people are too ‘lazy’ to read long sentences. I think it is hard to not being wordy for this poster because there is just so much information that has to be included in the poster. I just never thought that a press release should be written at a 6th grade level of sentences structures. Now that I think about it, it does make sense. It’s such a good advice.