DESIGN IN BUSINESS WRITING

Texts, written documents of various sorts, have a visual presence. The term, "design," when related to writing, involves the visual appeal of a page. To better understand the concept of design applied to writing, you must step back from a page, squint your eyes a little to ignore the words themselves, and try to "see" the text as a visual artifact. When you compare academic writing to business writing in this way, you will quickly see that the two kinds of writing differ dramatically in their design, or visual strategies.

DESIGN IN ACADEMIC WRITING

Academic writing, typically, looks like this:

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     Etcetera.......

You get the point. Academic texts, at least when viewed in the form of an essay, look linear and dense. Readers are expected to begin at the beginning, with the title, and read through to the end. In between, readers will find a paragraph that introduces a thesis, several body paragraphs that thoughtfully develop the thesis, and a concluding paragraph.

Now squint, and look at the visual effect of the text again. The term "white space" refers to color of the page itself, the background to the figures on the page (in this case "light yellow space"). Academic writers incorporate very little "white space" into their text. In the example provided above, "white space" exists around the title, in the margins, between the lines, and in the indentations at the beginning of each paragraph.

DESIGN IN BUSINESS WRITING

Business writers typically incorporate more white space in their texts. There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Use subheadings or internal sub-titles to show the structure of your text to the reader.
• Use lists and bullet points when listing information.
• Use graphs, charts, tables, and illustrations to make your point.
• Use color to bring attention to the most important parts of your document.

Increasignly, desktop publishing software drives the design of business writing. In this introductory course for business writing, you may not have access to the best desktop publishing programs or to a technical advisor who can help you use them. You do, however, have many options available to you even in the word-processing and email programs you are currently using. Experiment with the tool bar at the top of the page by placing your cursor on each square to learn what the program can do for you.

WHERE CAN I SEE MODELS FOR DESIGNING BUSINESS DOCUMENTS?

During this course, take the opportunity to look at the kinds of public documents that circulate in our society all around you -- memos posted on office walls, brochures and posters, junk mail, advertisements. Sometimes you have to look a bit closer by going to the library to look at annual reports from companies or to the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship to look at business plans and marketing plans. Finally, we will provide you with samples of project proposals and reports previously written by students in this course.

HOW DO BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS READ COMPANY DOCUMENTS?

When business readers read documents they do not always begin at the beginning and read through to the end. By using headings and subheadings to show the structure of your document to readers, you allow them to skip ahead to sections they need to read and skip over sections they do not need to read. Just as writing is a highly rhetorical activity in business settings, business readers also read for specific purposes. If you are generating a report with recommendations, for example, business professionals will almost always want to read your recommendations first. Business reports, therefore, often begin with an executive summary to foreground the recommendations. If the recommendations immediately make sense, a manager sometimes reads no further.

A FINAL NOTE OF CAUTION

Some students forget that design features can never become substitutes for content. As we all know, you might buy a product with a nice package once, but if the product fails to fulfull your expectations, you will never make that mistake again. Document design is a little bit like product packaging. It's possible for a document to look nice and fail miserably to convince its readers or to add an value to the organization. Although occasional lists of information can make a document easy to read, for example, documents that consist primarily of lists, pictures, graphs, etc., make shallow presentations. Your text, your words, your ability to build a case for your proposals and recommendations, as well as the design of your documents, will determine whether or not you will convince your readers.