Week 2: Designing, Proofreading, and Distributing Messages
In this section, we’ll discuss the importance of designing and proofreading your messages before they’re delivered. In the business world the physical appearance of your message may sometimes say more to an audience than its content. Strong writers understand this and know how to design an attractive and engaging document. Also, because first impressions are so important in the business world, good proofreading skills are vital. Error-free messages help you build your company’s credibility. Combining these skills will create a visually stimulating and accurate message that you can deliver with confidence.
“Hi, my name is Patrick Conreaux. I’m the vice president of Creative Solutions for IMG Live in Atlanta, GA. We’re an experiential marketing agency and what we do is we produce live events or we produce face-to-face engagements with consumer audiences. And we introduce them to a brand, a product, or a service that we feel suits their targeted needs and aspirations.”
IMPORTANCE OF GOOD PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
“I think physical appearance is everything in writing a message. I think the organization of the response to the message or the subject matter at hand is really paramount for someone who, especially in the business world, is time-starved, and who wants to get specifically to the information they’re looking for.
A lot of times it’s hard to determine exactly what information a client’s looking for, when the outline’s a list of parameters that he wants you to respond to. So I think being able to organize that information succinctly and lay it out on a page which, you know, provides headlines or tags to the way you’re providing the subject matter, is really helpful for clients these days. I think secondarily, the overall structure and the formatting of any type of message says a lot about your organization as a company. So I think it’s important that you pay close attention and you have a professional typesetter lay out your messaging, if it’s going to be circulated in a formal manner.”
COMMON ERRORS IN PROFESSIONAL DOCUMENT DESIGN
“What you should avoid in designing a professional document first of all is a lot of copy and information. You want to present only the most relevant facts. And sometimes it’s not as important as you think to present all the activities that you’ve conducted during the program; it’s more important to prioritize the facts and the figures that you’re presenting. So that material is presented up-front, it addresses their needs and their objectives first and foremost, and you can always add an appendix section in the back. You also want to avoid spending too much time on the negative—I think you want to use the negative situations or the key learnings to set up the positive solutions. So we never want to leave an open-ended situation in a report that says, ‘Here’s the problem we’ve ran into,’ without following it up with an opportunity and a solution that’s going to address that opportunity.”
HEADINGS, WHITESPACE, AND READABILITY
“Yeah, headings and whitespace really are important in terms of a document’s readability. Keep in mind that most readers these days aren’t sitting down by a fire, drinking a cup of coffee and kicking back and enjoying your report. I mean these are reports that are meant to be consumed quickly. People can quickly get through a document that has a lot of whitespace around because they don’t feel like they’re weeding through all the cluster of information to get to what they want. And I think it—whitespace—generally draws people in because they feel there’s not a lot of time involved in navigating through a particular page of a report.
I think the headings in particular tag the information that’s going to follow and that helps it easier for people to surf through the information if there’s specific elements that are more important to them. [sic] Then they’re going to look for those and headings and they’re going to key on those sections of the report. Where ordinarily if you don’t have headings you may lose them after the first couple paragraphs because they’re finding that the information there is not relevant to their specific needs.”
WRITING HEADINGS: WHAT TO CONSIDER
“The important thing to consider when writing headings is to quickly and sometimes colorfully outline the information that’s going to proceed in the paragraphs to follow. You want it to read like a headline on a page sometimes: You want it to grasp the reader’s attention and you also want it to succinctly talk to what the core of what the subject matter is. You may create more information to support a specific thesis or subject matter in a--underneath a heading but that heading itself should stick right to the point of “What is all the information centered around?”
MAKING A MESSAGE VISUALLY INTERESTING
“I think the best way to make any report visually interesting is with color, typography, and graphics in general. I think what you want to do is you want to combine the three elements. And sometimes you’re dealing with a limited amount of space so you may weigh more—one more than the other. I think a lot of things that people overlook are really typography. [sic] You know, you don’t always have to stick with the same font around a document. You don’t want to over-clutter it, but your headlines and your labels and some of the key values of what—of the subject matter you’re discussing can be called out in a very graphic way and typography is a big part of that. I think for all of us, who are laying out a PowerPoint presentation or if we’re laying out a Word document, just keep in mind that you can create a lot of interest in the way that you write words, the colors you use with those words. And I think in general any graphics that support the storytelling aspect can sometimes create a lot of personality in a document that otherwise you couldn’t exude from just the words themselves.[sic]
It’s important to use pictures effectively as well because I think a lot of times the images that you show on the page say more than the words themselves. You know, there’s a lot of stories you can tell with pictures that really describe why an event was or was not successful based upon the environment that it was placed within.”
BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF PROOFREADING
“The benefits and drawbacks of having someone else proofread your document. First off in terms of benefits I think it’s always important to have another set of eyes on your documents, especially if it’s a formal report or presentation where it’s being circulated as a step in evaluating your program. So I think the drawbacks is it can elongate the process and it can sometimes water down the messaging that you’re trying to create.[sic] I think the benefits though overall are that you know, sometimes you get consumed in a report and you don’t always have the right perspective to be able to weed out where you’re missing certain subject matter or even where you’re making mistakes and grammatical errors. And SpellCheck only catches, you know, 90% of the mistakes in a lot of the jargon and terminology you use.”