Nicole Amare

To Slideware or Not to Slideware: Students' Experiences with Powerpoint Vs. Lecture

This study analyzes the performance and attitudes of technical writing students in PowerPoint-enhanced and in non-PowerPoint lectures. Four classes of upper-level undergraduates (n = 84) at a mid-sized, Southern university taking a one-semester technical writing course were surveyed at the beginning and end of the course about their perceptions of PowerPoint. Of the four sections, two classes were instructed using traditional lecture materials (teacher at podium, chalkboard, handouts); the other two sections were instructed with PowerPoint presentations. All four classes were given the same pre- and post-test to measure performance over the course of the semester. Traditional lecture or PowerPoint presentations consisted of at least 50% of the course, with the remaining time spent on exercises and small group work. Results reveal that while most students say they preferred PowerPoint, performance scores were higher in the sections with the traditional lecture format.

Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication

Melody Bowden and J. Blake Scott’s Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication employs the “writing process” approach to undergraduate students taking their first service-learning course. Bowden and Scott have managed to create a user-friendly textbook, full of easy-to-follow student examples. Professional and technical communication educators will appreciate the layout of the text, the authors’ conversational tone, and the various samples to illustrate points. However, the book is sometimes burdened with unnecessary academic rhetoric and misguided placement of information—a problem that could have easily been fixed with the reorganization of chapters—and overuse of text instead of graphics.

The Language of Visuals: Text + Graphics = Visual Rhetoric Tutorial

Technical communication textbooks tend to address visual rhetoric as two separate units, usually a chapter on document design and then a chapter on graphics. We advocate teaching a unified system of visual rhetoric that encompasses both text and graphics within a common visual-language system. Using C. S. Peirces three-part theory of rhetoric and his ten categories of sign, we offer an integrated semiotic system, interpreting in one model the effectiveness of graphics, document design, and formatting, all considered as subtypes in this proposed visual rhetoric, organized around three primary communication goals: to decorate, to indicate, and to inform. Thus, any evaluation of visuals, either textual or graphic, must be made with reference to rhetorical contexts in which audience needs and graphic/textual media choices should align with authorial goals

The contribution of electronic communication media to the design process: communicative and cultural implications

Innovation in a companys design process is increasingly a matter of cooperation between the company and its customers. New information and communication technology (ICT) possibilities such as electronic communication (EC) media generate even more opportunities for companies to collaborate with customers during the early stages of research and development. This exploratory study examined the design process of five Dutch firms and the cultural and communicative implications of cooperation in the design process between the supplier and the customer using EC media. We found that the selected use of EC media for communication between R&D and customers has a positive effect on the design process. We also discovered that the characteristics of the most suitable EC media depend on the design activity and that the corporate and professional cultures of both the company and its customers involved in the cooperation seem to affect the communication media used. Finally, the future use of new ICT in the design area is discussed.

Writing for the Robot: How Employer Search Tools Have Influenced Résumé Rhetoric and Ethics

To date, business communication scholars and textbook writers have encouraged résumé rhetoric that accommodates technology, for example, recommending keyword-enhancing techniques to attract the attention of searchbots: customized search engines that allow companies to automatically scan résumés for relevant keywords. However, few scholars have discussed the ethical implications of adjusting résumé keywords for the sole purpose of increasing searchbot hits. As the résumé genre has evolved over the past century, strategies of résumé “padding” have likewise evolved, at each stage violating one of four maxims of the Cooperative Principle. Direct factual misrepresentation violates the maxim of quality and is of course discouraged, but résumé writers have turned in succession to violations of manner (formatting tricks) and then more recently to violations of quantity and/or relevance with deceptive keywording techniques. The authors conclude by suggesting several techniques to business communication instructors that may encourage students to create more ethically sound résumés.

Seeing typeface personality: Emotional responses to form as tone

Various studies have correlated specific visual characteristics of typefaces with specific overall emotional effects: curvilinear forms and open letter shapes generally feel “friendly” but also “formal” or “informal,” depending on other factors; large contrasts in stroke widths, cap height, and aspect ratio generally feel “interesting,” but also “attractive” or “aggressive,” depending on other factors; low-variety and low-contrast forms generally feel “professional” but also “reliable” or “boring.” Although the current findings on typeface personality are useful, they have not indicated a systematic explanation for why specific physical typeface forms have the specific emotion effects that they do. This paper will report results of an empirical study in which 102 participants indicated their immediate emotional responses to each of 36 distinct typeface designs. Results support correlation between specific typeface features (variety vs. contrast vs. pattern) and specific emotional parameters (amusement vs. agitation vs. focus), explaining findings of previous studies, suggesting various classroom approaches to purpose-driven typeface selection.

Emotion-spectrum response to form and color: Implications for usability

Previous empirical studies have shown consistent emotional responses to form and color, across a variety of contexts and especially across cultures. What varies across contexts and cultures is evaluation of the color/form/emotion response. For example, both the color red and jagged, high contrast forms consistently evoke one emotional response neutrally described as agitation or activation, a response evaluated negatively as anger or positively as excitement. Standard taxonomies of emotion do not consistently distinguish between the positive/negative evaluation of an emotion (e.g. committed/obsessed) and its raw quality (e.g. focused). Consequently, the consistent relationships between form/color and emotion have been obscured. We propose a new model of emotional response that treats color/form triggers of emotion quality separately from triggers of emotion evaluation. This new model identifies a spectrum of emotional quality (agitated-stimulated-amused-rested-focused-organized-concerned) generally parallel to the familiar color spectrum (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet). With this model, we can demonstrate a stable emotion-spectrum response in a population of viewers, to any given combination of form and color. This paper will report on empirical tests of this emotion spectrum model and discuss implications for usability testing of visual information designs.

A language for visuals: Design, purpose, usability

Information economy, indeed any economy, requires some common medium of exchange. We therefore seek clarity and commonality in the vocabulary of visual language. Visual vocabularies have of course been proposed by others, but we can demonstrate that, so far, they possess an artificiality effectively preventing widespread adoption. Therefore, what we propose is a comprehensive language for visuals that is derived from terms and concepts already extant in the visual rhetoric literature, but with a novel, unifying organization which, we will demonstrate, is organically grammatical in the precise sense of the word. Our goal is not to silence other language scholars who interpret visuals in their own ways but rather to offer up a safe space where, theories and ideologies and egos aside, we can collectively name what we collectively experience in visual information, then as technical communicators read and create visuals with a fuller understanding of how visuals work in relation to and separate from textual interpretation.

Using visual rhetoric to avoid PowerPoint pitfalls

Criticisms that Tufte and others have leveled against PowerPoint are not insurmountable defects of the programs themselves. These defects are generally due to an orientation, shared by program designers and users alike, and toward images rather than diagrams, toward perceptual decoration and object indication rather than toward visually mediated, iconic representations of verbal information. Using Peirces theories of visual rhetoric, we show that improvements in visual communication generally - and PowerPoint slides in particular - depend on shifting our orientation away from image-driven thinking and toward diagrammatic modes of presentation.

Back to the Future: A Usability Model of Hypertext Based on the Semiotics of C.S. Peirce

Though C.S. Peirces triads of sign-object-interpretant and icon-index-symbol are often cited in passing, few are aware that Peirce (circa 1900) expanded these triads to describe ten categories of sign (three kinds of icon, four kinds of index, and three kinds of symbol). We show how Peirces ten sign types correspond to ten distinct types of visuals common in 21st-century discourse, i.e. hypertext, and how a Peircean understanding of each visual type leads to principles of effective visual design, on the Web or in other forms of hypertext