Elevate Your Business Writing: Mastering the Effective Use of Visuals Workshop

Business Writing Workshop
Using Visuals Effectively
Frank Hurley and Donna Kain

Effective visuals should Help the audience What do they know? What do you need to tell them? What do they expect?

Effective visuals should Interest the audience What will be interesting to them? What can you teach them? What will keep them focused?

Effective visuals should Help you present your ideas clearly What is the best type of visual with which to display the information? What captions, keys, and labels are important to make the information clear?

Using Visuals Effectively Visuals can help make our numbers meaningful ideas more pronounced data more impactful

Using Visuals Effectively Use visuals present ideas completely. For example: Tables can show you whether you’ve included all the items in a comparison, as the table on the next slide does. Notice the caption at the top. You should use the text from captions to refer readers to accompanying visuals in a text.

Table 1. Delivery Companies Compared

Using Visuals Effectively Use visuals to find and reveal relationships. For example: Charts can depict differences and illustrate clusters. The next slide depicts account deficits from suppliers nationwide on a map of the US. Notice the key at the bottom of the chart that tells what the colors identify.

Surplus Deficit Even

Using Visuals Effectively Use visuals to make key points more vivid. For example: Readers skim memos and reports; visuals catch our eye. The pie chart on the next slide illustrates percentages of all sales produced by region. Notice that the slices are distinct and labeled; a key provides corresponding information; a caption helps tell the story.

Figure 1. 2011 Sales by Region 3% 7% 9% 11% 52% 18% Pie charts always represent a whole—100% of something. A convention is that the slices should be arranged from largest to smallest going clockwise. Avoid using a pie chart for more than 8-10 pieces of information.

Using Visuals Effectively Use visuals to focus on information that decision makers need. For example: The bar chart on the next slide compares sales by month. It doesn’t explain WHY the sales varied. Notice the labels on both the X and Y axes.

Figure 1. 2011 Sales by Month

Using Visuals Effectively Avoid “chart junk” and shapes that distort information. “Chart junk” can include background images, added dimension, extra lines, and other features that are unnecessary and potentially confusing.

Distorted information If you expect people to judge the size of, or relationships among, parts of graphics that represent data, don’t change the scale of the objects with 3-D or scale changes. The shading, angles, dimensions, and extra lines on both of the visuals above can distort information.

Some visuals are just…wrong. The parts of this pie add up to 193%. That’s not possible. It may be that the creators of this pie were attempting to tell a different story, but the choice of a pie was unfortunate.

Using Visuals Effectively Use visuals to emphasize your material. (…that might otherwise be skipped if buried in a paragraph).

Elevate Your Business Writing: Mastering the Effective Use of Visuals Workshop

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