Longman / Prentice Hall

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Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
Charles Kostelnick, Iowa State University
David D. Roberts, Iowa State University
Sam Dragga, Series Editor, Texas Tech University

ISBN-10: 0205200222
ISBN-13: 9780205200221

Publisher: Longman
Copyright: 1998
Format: Paper; 455 pp
Published: 12/16/1997

Suggested retail price: $76.40
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Written by two highly experienced teachers in the field of document design, Designing Visual Language offers useful strategies and tools for document design of all types. A chief goal is to enable students to extend to visual design the rhetorical approach they assimilate in writing and editing courses. The text focuses on the kinds of situations and practical documents that occur in the workplace and blends this focus with a rhetorical approach that ties design to the audience, purpose, and context of messages.

  • Early chapters provide a broad foundation in the rhetorical nature of visual design and the close relationship between visual and verbal language.
  • Offers a system for defining and analyzing visual language.
  • Extensive coverage of the vocabulary of design, from typography and page design to data displays and illustrations to whole documents.
  • Each design chapter begins with an illustrated narrative that describes a real world situation and which walks readers through the process of developing a particular document.
  • Extensive exercises and assignments are all class-tested ensuring that student practice is specifically tied to chapter content.

Chapters conclude with “Conclusion,” “Notes,” “References,” and “Exercises.”

I.INTEGRATED COMMUNICATION.

1.Rhetorical Background.

Introduction to Visual Rhetoric.

Visual/Verbal Cognates

Process Example—Mapleton Center.

Conventions—What Readers Expect.

2.Perception and Design.

Gestalt Principles of Design.

Empirical Research as a Design Tool.

3.Visual Analysis.

Introduction to Visual Analysis.

A Taxonomy for Visual Vocabulary.

Analyzing Visual Vocabulary Rhetorically.

II.TEXT DESIGN.

4. Linear Components.

Introduction to Linear Components.

Process Example—Linear Components.

Vocabulary of Linear Components.

Applying the Cognate Strategies to Linear Components.

Interdependence of the Cognate Strategies.

5.Text Fields.

Introduction to Text Fields.

Process Example—Fields.

Vocabulary of Text Fields.

Applying The Cognate Strategies.

Interdependence of Cognate Strategies.

6.Nonlinear Components.

Introduction to Nonlinear Components.

Process Example—Nonlinear Components.

Vocabulary of Nonlinear Components.

Applying the Cognate Strategies.

Interdependence of the Cognate Strategies.

III.EXTRA-LEVEL DESIGN.

7.Data Displays.

Process Example—Data Displays.

Vocabulary of Data Displays.

Applying the Cognate Strategies to Data Displays.

Interdependence of the Cognate Strategies.

8.Pictures.

Introduction to Designing Pictures.

Process Example—Pictures.

Vocabulary of Pictures.

Applying the Cognate Strategies.

Interdependence of the Cognate Strategies.

9.Icons, Logos, Symbols.

Introduction to Icons, Logos, and Symbols.

Process Example—Icons, Logos, Symbols.

Vocabulary of Icons, Logos, Symbols.

Applying the Cognate Strategies to Icons, Logos, Symbols.

Interdependence of Cognate Strategies.

IV.DOCUMENT DESIGN.

10.Supra-Level Elements: Designing for Usability.

Introduction for Designing for Usability.

Process Example—Supra-Level Elements.

Vocabulary of Supra-Level Elements.

Applying the Cognate Strategies.

Appendixes.

Pearson Higher Education offers special pricing when you choose to package your text with other student resources. If you're interested in creating a cost-saving package for your students, contact your Pearson Higher Education representative for pricing and ordering information.

This title is a member of the Technical Communication, which also contains the titles below . You can also visit the Technical Communication page.

    Written by two highly experienced teachers in the field of document design, Designing Visual Language offers useful strategies and tools for document design of all types. A chief goal is to enable students to extend to visual design the rhetorical approach they assimilate in writing and editing courses. The text focuses on the kinds of situations and practical documents that occur in the workplace and blends this focus with a rhetorical approach that ties design to the audience, purpose, and context of messages.

  • 0205200222Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Kostelnick, Roberts & Dragga
    © 1998 | Longman | Paper; 455 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205200222 | ISBN-13: 9780205200221
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This book deals with ethics and value systems as they relate to technical and scientific discourse. While it covers several traditional ethical theories from classical to contemporary times, it also emphasizes that ethics is a personal matter of judgment. The book shows students how to become involved with thinking about and applying these theories to their own discourse. The fact that there are no easy answers to ethical questions is emphasized.

    Issues that are covered include how and why information is obtained and how it will be used; how the meaning of technical terms shift with the value perspectives behind them; and how science and technology can be used to put forth questionable values or to serve values not apparent in the discourse.

  • 0205274625Ethics in Technical Communication (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Dombrowski & Dragga
    © 2000 | Longman | Paper; 258 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205274625 | ISBN-13: 9780205274628
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Global Contexts offers a series of case studies about real and fictitious situations that allow students to understand the issues surrounding international and cross-cultural technical communication.

    Cases are individually authored and have been created by many of the leading authorities in the field of international technical communication. The text is intended to help graduate and undergraduate students understand the context of and issues involved in writing for international audiences, as it has become increasingly common in the evolving global marketplace to address such audiences, especially in technical fields.

  • 0205286828Global Contexts: Case Studies in International Technical Communication (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Bosley
    © 2001 | Longman | Paper; 216 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205286828 | ISBN-13: 9780205286829
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This guide teaches students and professionals a systematic process for researching, designing, writing, and submitting successful grant-seeking proposals.

    Focusing on proposals submitted for government, foundation, and corporation funding, Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age leads the reader through a six-step grant-seeking process, from researching potential funders, to designing, writing and submitting a proposal that follows the funder's guidelines. Grounded in theory, but rooted in successful practice, it teaches students what really works—a third of students who submit proposals based on this text's approach get funded within a year. The text's guided discovery process provides a useful framework for novice writers while its thinking-planning exercises offer useful ways of organizing information and discovering what still need to be researched.

  • 032116007XGrant Seeking in an Electronic Age (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Mikelonis, Betsinger & Kampf
    © 2004 | Longman | Paper; 512 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 032116007X | ISBN-13: 9780321160072
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Management Principles and Practices for Technical Communicators presents theory and practice in a manner designed to help practicing managers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.

    The book covers areas of management that are specific to technical communication groups, focusing on how such groups should position themselves within larger organizations and how they should interact and communicate with other groups. These tasks and others are consistently informed by the book's four main premises: that technical communication managers need to conceptualize what they do, that they must understand and participate in the overall goals of their larger organizations, that technical communicators are developers who create products and services and not merely support, and that technical communication managers must educate peers and upper management to the value that their groups add to the development process.

  • 0321165233Management Principles and Practices for Technical Communicators (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Dicks
    © 2004 | Longman | Paper; 272 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0321165233 | ISBN-13: 9780321165237
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Oral Presentations for Technical Communication provides what most technical communication textbooks lack: clear, accessible instruction on speaking. This book helps students and professionals master public speaking in a technical or scientific environment, whether it be through traditional presentations with whiteboards and flipcharts or presentations with computer software such as PowerPoint. Unlike most general speech texts, which include examples from various disciplines, Oral Presentations uses specific examples from the fields of science and technology and shows how skilled technical communicators make complex information accessible to non-technical audiences.

    The first three parts of the book focus on basic skills and concepts, including four basic types of presentations relevant to technical communication. The last two parts introduce more advanced topics, such as legal, privacy, and censorship issues, and the changing nature of presentations in the digital age.

  • 0205294154Oral Presentations for Technical Communication: (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Gurak & Dragga
    © 2000 | Longman | Paper; 263 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205294154 | ISBN-13: 9780205294152
    URL: http://www.abacon.com/gurak
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This is a conceptually rich textbook that teaches Web design skills and offers practical guidance within a coherent framework of information-design principles and hypertext theory.

    The authors believe website design should be taught as a substantive body of knowledge, an application of rhetoric to a new non-linear medium. This book offers students a great deal of practical, mainstream design guidance—as much as can be found in any trade book. But in contrast to trade books, Principles of Web Design offers a coherent, evolving framework of ideas.

  • 0205302912Principles of Web Design (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Farkas, Farkas & Dragga
    © 2002 | Longman | Paper; 400 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205302912 | ISBN-13: 9780205302918
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This market-leading text has been thoroughly revised to reflect recent changes in technology, workplace practices and the global marketplace. The book progresses from concepts and basic copyediting to comprehensive editing, management and production issues. Coverage now includes a new chapter on client projects.

    Technical Editing takes a comprehensive approach to editing and defining editorial responsibility in terms of information design and the overall effectiveness of a document in helping readers understand and complete tasks. Expanding the concept of editing from a narrow focus on sentence-level revisions for correctness, this book encourages students to think about the effects of word choices, sentences, organization and design. Students learn that the measure of a “good” document is in part outside that document, in the document’s “match” to the users' needs and the author's goals.

    The textbook with its supplementary Web site and instructor’s manual offers a complete editing course, including materials for daily workshops and discussion and longer documents for graded assignments. In a password-protected portion of the Web site, instructors can also retrieve illustrations of edited versions as well as suggested responses to daily activities. Both focused and flexible, Technical Editing includes assignments carefully crafted to develop specific editing competencies and modular chapters that allow instructors to adapt the text to meet their own course goals and methods. 
  • 032133082XTechnical Editing, 4/E
    Rude
    © 2006 | Longman | Paper; 480 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 032133082X | ISBN-13: 9780321330826
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Part of the new Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication, Technical Writing Style is equally appropriate as a core text or as a supplement. This text offers the most current and comprehensive instruction available in achieving an effective style in technical docu- ments. It shows that technical prose style varies from the highly formal to the colloquial, from the pretentious to the plain, and it demonstrates the many stylistic strategies writers should consider for every technical document they write.

    Among the major topics included are: style and technical writing style; audiences and discourse communities; persuasion through style; diction; style in sentences and paragraphs; tone; bias; ethics; and editing for style. Throughout, engaging real-world case studies and numerous examples reinforce the author's discussion of effective and ineffective technical prose styles.

  • 0205197221Technical Writing Style (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Jones & Dragga
    © 1998 | Longman | Paper; 302 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205197221 | ISBN-13: 9780205197224
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Built on a solid foundation of current research in the field, Carol Barnum's Usability Testing and Research provides a comprehensive, up-to-date perspective in this increasingly important area of technical communication.

    Adopting a practical approach to the field of usability and the techniques for usability testing, this book lays out the subject from beginning to end: starting with definitions of usability, usability testing, and the way in which usability testing fits into a user-centered design process, then progressing through other methods of gathering data, as well as methods for learning about users, tasks, and environments. Following a chapter on ways to test throughout product design, the second half of the book focuses on planning, conducting, and reporting the results of usability testing. The last chapter discusses the usability testing of web sites.

  • 0205315194Usability Testing and Research (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Barnum & Dragga
    © 2002 | Longman | Paper; 448 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205315194 | ISBN-13: 9780205315192
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Founded on rhetorical principles guiding the field of technical/business/professional writing, Writing Proposals offers a comprehensive, activity-based approach to proposal and grant proposal development.

     

    Writing Proposals provides readers with a full range of tools needed to develop sound, convincing proposals.  This comprehensive and up-to-date text, takes readers step-by-step through the development process, helping them invent their ideas, organize their materials, write in plain and persuasive styles, and create an effective visual design.

     

    The inclusion of grantwriting expands the range of uses for this book. The second edition offers full coverage of this important subgenre of proposal writing. One of the case studies that runs through the book shows a team of people writing a grant to a private foundation. Readers will find the book very helpful for writing grants to fund research and good causes.

  • 0205583148Writing Proposals, 2/E
    Johnson-Sheehan
    © 2008 | Longman | Paper; 288 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205583148 | ISBN-13: 9780205583140
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Part of the Allyn & Bacon series in technical communication, Writing Software Documentation features a step-by-step strategy to writing and describing procedures.

    This task-oriented book is designed to support both college students taking a course and professionals working in the field. Teaching apparatus includes complete programs for students to work on and a full set of project tracking forms, as well as a broad range of examples including Windows-style pages and screens and award-winning examples from STC competitions.

  • 0321103289Writing Software Documentation: A Task-Oriented Approach (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication), 2/E
    Barker
    © 2003 | Longman | Paper; 496 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0321103289 | ISBN-13: 9780321103284
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This is the first collection of narratives by practicing technical communicators telling their own personal stories about the workplace and their lives on and off the job.

    The stories vividly demonstrate the unique power of narrative as a teaching and learning tool. Unlike fabricated cases, these real-life narratives show new and veteran technical writers at work on the job, dealing with tasks, clients, and co-workers, and revealing their insights, values, and attitudes about their work. The stories also show the skills required in the profession and the ethical and other issues raised in the course of the workday.

  • 0205321062Writing a Professional Life: Stories of Technical Communicators On and Off the Job (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication)
    Savage, Sullivan & Dragga
    © 2001 | Longman | Paper; 292 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0205321062 | ISBN-13: 9780205321063
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Writing for the Government blends experience-based theory with actual workplace applications from a wide range of fields and documents to prepare readers for positions in government.

     

    Taking a rhetorical approach to writing, the authors encourage students to consider every document’s audience, purpose, and cultural context and increase the effectiveness of their communication.  Writing is also presented as a process, particularly collaborative, in which authors have a stake in the outcome.  The purpose is to prepare students to become “adaptable” writers regardless of their job, their agency, or its writing tasks.

  • 0321427017Writing for the Government
    Allison & Williams
    © 2008 | Longman | Paper; 320 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0321427017 | ISBN-13: 9780321427014
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • Practical, applied, and up-to-the-minute, Writing for the Health Professions teaches students, healthcare professionals, and professional writers the essential skills in medical and health communications.

    Drawing on her extensive experience as a nurse, cardio-pulmonary technician, medical writer, and writing teacher, Barbara Heifferon addresses the communications requirements of the healthcare professions and those who write in these high-tech fields. This comprehensive text covers writing situations and documents common in hospitals, clinics, HMOs, health insurance companies, public health campaigns, and other healthcare environments. Special attention is given to visual and electronic forms of communication, including Web sites and multimedia productions.

  • 0321105273Writing in the Health Professions
    Heifferon
    © 2005 | Longman | Paper; 336 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0321105273 | ISBN-13: 9780321105271
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

    • This rhetorical, multi-disciplinary guide teaches the major genres of science writing, including research reports, grant proposals, conference presentations, and a variety of forms of public communication.

    Writing in the Sciences combines a descriptive approach—helping students to recognize distinctive features of common genres in their fields—with a rhetorical focus—helping them to analyze how, why, and for whom texts are created by scientists. Multiple samples from real research cases illustrate a range of scientific disciplines and audiences for scientific research, along with the corresponding differences in focus, arrangement, style, and other rhetorical dimensions. Comparisons among disciplines provide the opportunity for students to identify common conventions in science and investigate variation across fields.

  • 0321112040Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication), 2/E
    Penrose & Katz
    © 2004 | Longman | Paper; 464 pages | Instock
    ISBN-10: 0321112040 | ISBN-13: 9780321112040
    Brief Description | Buy from myPearsonStore

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