ENGL 2901
Wednesday, January 29th
For Next week
No formal class meeting.
- Watch the video introduction to the job application assignment.
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Download and complete the professional inventory worksheet (available on Moodle). Post your self-analysis to the appropriate forum.
- Sign up for the resume and cover letter workshops to be held Monday 2/10 and Tuesday 2/11.
Rhetorical Analysis Assignment
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Any Questions?
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What interesting strategies are you identifying?
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Let's look at an example of a proposal that totally fails. Why does it fail?
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Let's look at one that succeeds? What works here? What rhetorical strategies influence the viewer to fund the project?
Why focus on design?
Good Design=Good Ethos
Good Design=Audience Identification
PARC is a system of design, layout, and logic. It anticipates a reader's needs and frames information to meet conscious and unconscious expectations.
People read quickly. An HR rep, for example, will spend 30 seconds reading through resumes. If your information is not carefully selected, strategically placed, and well-ordered guess what happens?
Proximity
Basic Rule: "Group related items together" (15)
Items joined by theme, goal, etc. should be presented as one entity; the reader should not have to intuit relationships between these things. Conversely, items that aren't related should not be grouped together.
"Proximity, or closeness, implies a relationship" (17). This is a rhetorical concern as it points to "visually" and "intellectually" anticipating audience need and expectation. You are eliminating confusion.
Alignment
Basic rules: "Find a strong line and use it" and "Nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every item should have a visual connection with something else on the page" (31).
Unify and organize; direct your reader's eye with strong lines.
Experiment with your text to determine which alignments are most effective. Try: flush left, flush right, centered, justified, center alley. In any document, each choice will provide you with a different "look" (and, by relation, level of accessibility).
Repetition
Basic rule: "repeat some aspect of the design throughout your entire text" (49).
Repeated elements can include: fonts, lines, graphics, bullets, colors, spatial relationships, headings, etc.
Williams also calls repetition "consistency"; patterned, repeated elements that unify the document and make it more interesting.
Williams describes repetition as an opportunity to "push the existing consistencies a little further" (62); in other words, we use repetition by nature, the principle of repetition asks us to use it consciously as we structure a page.
Contrast
Basic rule: "if two items are not exactly the same, make them different. Really different." I would emphasize that contrast helps you structure the reader's experience by encouraging some aspects of a page to stand out.
Contrast creates interest and organizes attention (it prioritizes where and how the reader looks at the page).
Options include: large/small font, pairing font styles, thin/thick lines, horizontal/vertical components, background color/font color.
ENGL 2901
By Scott Rogers
