Chapter 5 Principles of Document Design Summary

     Chapter 5 in Diana Hacker's "Rules For Writers" lays out the different forms of document design. Selecting your heading, footer, and font size are three major elements that form your appearance of your documents. Different types of headings like those ending with ing, noun, question, and imperative sentences are described. Using lists to help readers collect information quicker is an effective method. Lists need to be introdused with an independent clause followed by a colon. Adding different types of visuals to your documentaion can help a lot. For example, at my work we write instructions for manufacturing that include pictures that accurately depict the operation being performed, where som paragraphs could not give an operator the same level of detail. Graphs, tables, maps, and charts are shown in the next section. Displaying data accurately is very important as well as displaying it in a method that is chewable for a meeting atmosphere or if its posted in an email it should be bulleted for quick bites of info, with links to the details if needed by the recipient.