Lecture 31 Using Visual Aids

1. Lecture 31 Using Visual Aids In this lecture we will learn to • Look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives • Choose visual aids appropriate to your objectives • Make your visual aids easy to understand and use • Fully integrate your visual aids with your prose More than Just Aids • The name visual aids can be misleading because it suggests that in the writing you do at work, your words are primary and the visual aids are merely assistants. • When used creatively and effectively, visual aids are an integral part of communications. • In some situations, visual aids can carry the entire message. • For instance, if you’ve ever flown, you may recall reaching into the pocket on the back of the seat ahead of you to pullout a sheet of instructions for leaving the plane in an emergency. • Many airlines use sheets that are wordless. • Although you may never create a communication that relies solely on visual aids, you should remember that visual aids are powerful communication tools, not mere decorations or supplements. Computers and Visual Aids • The guidelines discussed in this lecture will help you not only with visual aids using traditional methods, but also those you might create on a computer. • That’s because many computer programs for making visual aids leave essential design decisions to you. • For instance, if you are using a program to make a line graph, you will still have to decide which variable to place on the horizontal axis and which on the vertical axis. • You will still have to decide what intervals to use for your variables, and what your labels should say. • If you use a computer program that doesn’t leave the basic decisions to you, you will have to determine whether the designs created by the program are good ones. • If you determine that the program’s standard designs aren’t good, you should obtain a different program or make the visual aids some other way.

2. Computer programs for visual aids may present one other difficulty. • However, if you create fancy visual aids, some people become so enthralled with the program’s ability to create special effects that they forget the purpose and readers of their communication. Guidelines • Look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives. • The first step in using visual aids effectively is to search actively for places where they can help you achieve your communication objectives. Show what something looks like • In every field, people describe physical objects: machines, experimental apparatuses, organs of animals etc. • For instance, an engineer who designs a new hinge can explain the designs and its virtues to other engineers who might want to use it much better with diagrams than he could with words. Show how to do something • In many circumstances, visual aids provide the best form of instructions. • For example, if a writer needed to explain how to remove a piece of paper jammed in a photocopy machine, she can do so much more effectively with the use of diagrams than with words. Show how something is organized • At work, you may need to describe the relationships among the various departments and divisions of your employer’s company or among the parts of a computer system. • In such a case, using diagrams can provide readers with an excellent understanding of the complex relationships. Clarify the relationships among numerical data • On the job, you may need to describe the relationships among various pieces of data, which may be from laboratory research, surveys etc. • Visual aids can help you make those relationships immediately clear to your readers using graphs and other visual techniques. Support your arguments • You can also use visual aids to present information in support of your persuasive points. • For example, the manufacturer of a plastic insulating material can use visual aids like graphs to persuade greenhouse owners of the comparable effects of different kinds of plastics.

3. Make detailed information easy to find • For many tasks ,visual aids are much easier than prose for readers to use. • For example, a manufacturer of photographic wants to inform trainees of the length of time they should leave the film in the developer solution. • Since the time depends on several factors like tank size, temperature etc, the information can be conveyed effectively by using a simple table. Guidelines • To take full advantage of the powerful assistance visual aids can provide, begin searching for places to use them when making your very first plans for writing. • Early planning will help you coordinate your prose and visual aids from the beginning, thereby reducing the amount of revision. • Although visual aids can help you immensely, you should guard against putting them in thoughtlessly, be sure that each is designed to achieve its specific purpose. • One you have decided where to use visual aids, you must decide which type to use. • First, consider the objectives of your visual aid, thinking about those objectives in exactly the same way you think about the objectives of your overall communication. • Identify the task you want the visual aid to enable your readers to perform while reading your visual aid, then decide how you want the visual aid to affect your readers’ attitudes. Consider your readers’ tasks • Different visual aids are suited to different reading tasks, often the same information can be presented in many different ways. • For instance, Ben has collected information on the starting salaries of people who graduated from three different departments. • Which visual aid should he use? • If Ben’s purpose is simply to enable the readers to learn the average starting salary of the graduates, he could use a table (shown on the next slide). • If Ben wants them to be able to see at a glance how the average starting salary in their department compared with those in that same year from other departments, he could use a bar graph. • If Ben wants them to be able to see how the average starting salary in their department changed over the years and to compare that change with the changes experienced by other departments, he could use a line graph.

4. Consider your readers' attitudes • In addition to thinking about your readers’ tasks, you should also look to pick the type of visual aid that most quickly and dramatically communicates the evidence that supports your persuasive point. • For instance, showing the effect of a decrease in revenue in a line graph is much more suitable than a tabular form which requires the readers to do a lot of subtracting to appreciate the extent of the decrease. • Readers will not find our visual aids either useful or persuasive unless you use the ones they know how to read. • Although some types are familiar to us all, like bar graphs, pie charts etc; others are much more specialized. • Although they are very informative to people who understand the symbols and conventions used, they will only baffle others. • Be especially careful to avoid making the mistake of assuming your potential readers know how to read specialized figures. Make your visual aids easy to understand and use • Having chosen the type of visual aid you will use, you must design the aid itself. • When doing so, remember that, like your prose, your visual aids should be easy for your readers to understand and use. Design your visual aids to support our readers’ tasks • The most important step in designing visual aids that are easy to understand and use is to imagine your readers in the act of using your visual aid. • Remember that you are not trying not only to display information but to help your audience to understand and use the information. Make your visual aids simple • Avoid the temptations of cramming too much information into your visual aids. • Sometimes, two or three visual aids can communicate the same information more effectively than one. • Simplifying visual aids also means removing unnecessary details. • Like unnecessary words in prose, superfluous details in visual aids create extra, unproductive work for readers and obscure the really important information. • You will find great variation from situation to situation in the kinds of details you need to eliminate. • The general procedure remains the same: find and eliminate any details not needed to understand and use your visual aid.

5. Label the important content clearly • While it is important for you to eliminate unnecessary details form your visual aids, it is also critical to include labels for the important content. • Labels also help people know what they are seeing when they read a figure. • TO create labels, first determine what parts need labeling. • In some cases it is easy to do, for instance, every row and column usually needs a heading. • In other cases, you should label every part that your readers will need to find in a particular visual aid. • On the other hand, avoid labeling parts your readers won’t e looking for. • Unnecessary labels clutter a visual aid and make it difficult to understand and use. • Some visual aids don’t even need labels, for instance, the title of your visual aid may make clear what the important parts are. • After deciding which parts need a label, choose the appropriate word or words and place them where they are easy to see. • If readers might be unsure what part is identified by the label, draw a line from the label to the part. Provide Informative Titles • Titles help your audience find the visual aids they are looking for and know what the visual aids contain when they find them. • To help your audience understand and use your visual aids, you should make the descriptive part of your titles as brief – yet informative – as possible. • Titles typically include both a number and a description. • Visual aids are numbered consecutively, either in one long sequence through the entire communication, or with a new sequence in each chapter. • According to custom, the numbers assigned to figures are usually Arabic (1,2,3..) while numbers assigned to tables are either Arabic or Roman (I, II,III…) • Conventions about where to place the titles vary. • In typewritten communications, title are almost always placed above table and below figures. • Generally they are centered between the margins. • Within a single typeset communication, all tables share a consistent placement of titles, as do figures. • Long reports, proposals and instruction manuals sometimes have special tables of content that list the number, title and location of each individual aid.

6. You should note that sometimes you don’t need to provide a title for a visual aid. • That happens, for instance, when you are including a very short table in your text in a way that makes perfectly clear what it contains. • Similarly, the visual aids in brochures are often untitled, though they are much rarer in reports and proposals. • One important guideline is that you should resist the temptation to let your decisions about visual aids be determined by what you have handy or what you have done in some other document. • By doing that you would be taking a writer-centered approach to visual aids, perhaps not the one that is most likely to be useful or persuasive to your readers. Fully integrate your visual aids with your prose • You should integrate your visual aid with your prose so that they work together harmoniously to create a single, unified message. • Three ways to do that are: • to introduce your visual aids in your prose • State the conclusions you want your readers to draw • Make your visual aids easy to find Introduce your visual aids in your prose • When people read sequentially through a written communication, they read one sentence, then the next, one paragraph then the next, and so on. • When you want the next element they read to be a visual aid rather than a sentence or a paragraph, carefully direct the readers’ attention from your prose to the visual aid to indicate what they will find in the visual aid. • Sometimes, your introduction to a visual aid will have to include information your readers or listeners need in order to understand or use the visual aid. • Whatever kind of introduction you make to a visual aid, place it at the exact point where you would like your readers to focus their attention to it. State the conclusions you want you readers to draw • A visual aid presents your readers with a set of facts and unless you tell what conclusions you want them to draw from those facts, they may draw a different one than you want them to. • Consider, for example, the way a writer discussed a graph that showed how many orders he thought his company would receive for its rubber hoses over the next six months.

7. The graph showed that there would be a sharp decline in orders from automobile plants, and the writer feared that his readers might focus on that fact, so he wrote the following to steer them to his point: As Figure 7 indicates, our outlook for the next six months is very good. Although we predict fewer orders from automobile plants, we expect the slack to be taken up by increased demand among auto parts outlets. • You might find it helpful to think of the sentences in which you explain a visual aid’s significance as a special kind of topic sentence. • Just as the topic sentence at the head of a paragraph, you can tell your audience the point to be derived from the various facts that follow. Make your visual aids easy to find • What happens when your readers come to a statement in which you ask them to look to a certain visual aid? • Instead of going on to read the next sentence, as they would normally do, they will search for the visual aid. • You want to make that search as short and simple as possible. • You should put your visual aids where your readers can locate them quickly. • The ideal location is on the same page as the prose that accompanies the visual aid. • Not only will the visual aid be easy to find, but your readers will be able to look back and forth between the prose and visual aid, if necessary. • You may not always have room for your visual aid on the same page as the prose that introduces it. • If your communication has text on facing pages, try to put the visual aid on the page facing its accompanying prose. • If your communication does not have facing pages of text, try to put your visual id on the next page following its introduction. • If you place the figure farther away than that (for instance in an appendix), you can help your readers by providing the number of the page on which the figure may found. • For example: A detailed sketch of this region of the new building’s floor plan is shown in Figure 17 in Appendix C (page 53) Conclusion • Visual aids can greatly increase the clarity and impact of your written communications. • To use visual aids well, you need to follow the same reader centered strategy that you would use when writing your prose. • Doing so will enable you to decide where to use visual aids, how to make them effective and integrate them successfully with your prose.

8. In this lecture we learnt to • Look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives • Choose visual aids appropriate to your objectives • Make your visual aids easy to understand and use • Fully integrate your visual aids with your prose