English 421K, Technical Writing

The way that the design is set up now is very efficient; it makes the most of every bit of white space available. This works when needing to fit into a text book, but is not necessary that it be margin to margin for Lois Adler’s particular situation. For her purposes, it seems overwhelming and overly scientific. These are people that are used to a child’s environment, bright colors, cartoony pictures and over simplification. For balance, I may take the form out of columns, but keep it in full paragraphs. In the left (extended) margin for each paragraph it may be helpful to put a one sentence summary of the paragraph it is next to. An “if you read nothing else in this paragraph” type of summary. This may encourage a skimming of the document, but this may be as opposed to not reading it at all. Another balance design that may work is a centered image, such as in figure 10.3. I would not put a scorpion, because that may be frightening, but probably a picture of the author, or something similarly comforting. For alignment, Lois Adler may want to break the information into an outline and stagger the alignment to create a hierarchy of information. If not, she may want to stick to standard alignment. For grouping she may want to reorder the article to put the most urgent information first. This way, people may not skip ahead to what they think they need to know. If it flows logically from the red alert information, they may read it all. However she changes it, it should be consistent in form. That is, font, style, alignment and so on should all be the same throughout the document. Because this is a technical and serious article, I think the contrast should stay in a simple black and white, unless there are pictures added. To highlight important parts, she may want to bold certain terms or sentences she may want to reference later on. Additionally, my suggestion would be to preface this document with an outline, to aid readers with problems comprehending. Adding white space may take away the feeling of apprehension in timid readers, but it will also make the document longer, perhaps intimidating them again. So, attaching an outline still gets the important information across without everyone needing to read the entire article.