What is a good document?

A good document needs to have good coordination or designing skills acquired by the author. Writing to communicate is what every author should seek or do everyday in their daily life to share their thoughts and visions with their readers who seeks more knowledge. According to Putnis, Peter and Petelin, Roslyn (1996), writing to communicate is usually everyone’s choice rather than speaking to communicate as ‘writing is more readily a form and source of learning than talking’ that is also supported by Dowst (1980, p.69). Writing a document also has its’ format to be followed but eventually every author turns to the importance of document design to present their thoughts and visions for the audiences to be understand clearly.

According to Reep (2006), the usage of graphics and pictures, the usage of format elements, design principles including the typographic devices and many more will be used to design the document that will smoothen the reader’s reading paths of the document and to also make the author’s document more presentable to the current culture or generation that is moving forward into the digital era. So, authors must start bringing in fresh ideas on how to attract the audiences strongly enought so that they pick up a book and read it.

But according to Shriver (1997), the interplay of words and images that is called multimodal text has been helping audiences to read in a same manner as the images and text can link with one another to either support one another or vice versa in the author’s point of view (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). But both Walsh (2006) and Shriver (1997), kind of disagreed with Kress & van Leeuwen’s point of view by saying that sometimes images can also stand alone and can send out a thousand meaning that would be derived and interpreted by the audiences. Walsh (2006) also mentioned that the era or generation nowadays would prefer to read most of the information online.

Sample of an interplay of words and images (from slides):

The title of the book interacts with the picture so that readers can interpret many ideas from it.

Another sample where an online document is featured. Information online has to be presented with good document design to attract a readers attention.

I would like to conclude that, a good document design is rewarding as it attracts all sorts of audiences to read and news of the stories might just be passed on the other people.


Reference List:

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Reading Images. Chapter 1: The Semiotic Landscape: Language and Visual Communication.

Putnis, Peter & Petelin, Roslyn 1996, Writing to communicate: in Professional communication, p.238.

Reep, Diana C. 2006, Chapter 4:Principles of Document Design: in Technical Writing, 6th ed., Pearson Edu, Inc., New York, p. 173–190.

Shriver, K.A 1997, Chapter 6 in Dynamics in Document.

Walsh, M. 2006, Textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.