The Case Study Project: Building A Community/workplace Writing Opportunity For Students (2)

By Author: Friendhdx
Total Articles: 47
Comment this article

Phase Two: Teaching Students about the Importance of Visual Design
One of our goals is to teach students that, along with the text, the visual elements of a document are often selected based on genre, the writer's goals, the reader's expectations, and the subject that is being communicated. As the teacher, you do not need to have specialized knowledge of fonts, spacing, read-ability, or layout to teach visual design. We are all persuaded by the visual construction of texts around us. The trick is to help students step back and ex-amine Breitling Replica the visual aspects of a text as part of a text's rhetorical construction. Once students realize how visual elements are used effectively in the documents they read and use, they can use the same vi-sual moves in their own texts.

Here are some visual design terms and concepts that we share with students and ask them to identify in sample documents:
1. Readability
2. Page layout (columns, boxes, tri-fold,
double-sided)
3. Font choice
4. Use of white space
5. Color
...
... 6. Images (logos, icons, artwork)
7. Page layout and placement
8. Presentation (kinds of papers, color of paper, bindings)
9. Headers and footers
10. Heading and subheadings
11. Textual emphasis: text with underlining, boldface, and italics
12. Charts, tables, visual aids, photos, etc.

We demonstrate and teach students about these concepts in class through inquiry and demonstrations. For example, Michelle asks students to work in groups to identify a webpage that makes effective use of visual elements and a webpage that makes ineffective use of visual elements, and then the students present the pages to the class, explaining what they see as effective and ineffective use of visual design. During each presentation, students are invited to chime in on what they see as effective and ineffective design choices. After all the groups have presented, she asks the class to think about patterns they saw across the presentations, and then, with the class, she creates lists of pointers on what makes for effective and ineffective design. There are many possibilities for such an assignment. For Omega Replica Watches instance, teachers might want to tap into students' extracurricular interests and create a faux MySpace or Facebook account/webpage and ask for students' help in how to design it effectively.

Once students begin to examine texts from their everyday lives, advertising, and the Web, the multiple ways that visual elements are used to communicate to multiple audiences becomes more obvious. Our goal is to help them to read these real-world examples more critically and also to allow them to make more informed choices when designing documents for their client in the days ahead.