 Lecture 31 As-Salaam-Alaikum. Welcome to the virtual university's course on business and technical communication. In today's lecture we will look at how to use visual aids in your business and technical writing. We will learn to look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives. We will also look at how to choose visual aids which are appropriate to your objectives as you know there are many different types of visual aids so you need to decide which visual aid is appropriate for your objective, the purpose of your communication. We will also look at how to make your visual aids easy to understand and easy to use and how to fully integrate your visual aids with your prose. Now visual aids are more than just aids. The name visual aids can be misleading because it suggests that they are aids to the prose, that in the writing that you do at work your words are primary and visual aids are mainly assistants. However, this is not the case. Your visual aids are absolutely as necessary and as important as the prose that your writing is. When used effectively and creatively visual aids are an integral part of communications. They are as important as the prose that they are accompanying. In some situations in fact visual aids can carry the entire message. They can exist without prose. For instance, if you've ever flown you may recall reaching into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of you to pull out a sheet of instructions for leaving the plane in an emergency. That sheet has no prose. They are only pictures and the whole process is illustrated through pictures. Many airlines use these sheets and they are wordless. They only rely on visual aids. However, you in a business situation may never create a communication that relies solely on visual aids. Most of the times, in fact probably all the time, your communications will integrate visual aids with some form of prose. You should remember that visual aids are powerful communication tools. They are not merely decorations or supplements or accessories to prose. They are very powerful but they need to be used properly. The guidelines discussed in this lecture will help you not only with the visual aids that you use using traditional methods but also visual aids that you might create on a computer. In this day and age, increasingly we use visual aids through the computer anyway so we are going to talk about that. Also, we are going to talk about how to design visual aids using the computer because many computer programs which make visual aids leave essential decisions especially essential decisions regarding design to the person who is doing the writing or the person who is actually putting in the visual aid which is you. So even though you are using the computer, even though the aid will be given to you by the computer, you need to make essential decisions about the design of that visual aid. For instance, if you are using a program to make a line graph, you will still have to decide which variable to place on the horizontal axis and which variable to place on the vertical axis. You will still have to decide what intervals to use for variables and what your labels should say. So although the graph will be designed for you, the physical aspect of the graph will be designed for you, the decisions about what goes where, how you should actually input the information, what type of labeling to use etc will be decisions that you will make and you need to keep a lot of considerations in mind when you are making these decisions and it is these considerations that we will focus on today. If you use a computer program that does not leave the basic decisions to you, you will have to determine whether the design that is created by the program is good or not. According to your purpose, according to your need, you will need to then decide whether that design is appropriate or not as well. If you determine that the program's standard designs aren't good, you should obtain a different program or make the visual aids in some other way. So you will need to know exactly what is needed in a visual aid, exactly what aspects you need to keep in mind when designing a visual aid so that you can make good discerning decisions about what program to use, what visual aid to include in your text and how to do it. Computer programs for visual aids may present one other difficulty as well. If you create fancy visual aids, some people become so enthralled and so excited by the program's ability to create special effects that they forget the purpose and the readers of the communication. So a lot of the times what people do is that when they are writing, including visual aids, they tend to go with the look of the visual aid rather than the purpose of that. And they forget the purpose of making visual aids attractive and beautiful. And what readers will understand from this is that it is only beautiful. And that, believe me, tends to be a very major problem when working with computers because obviously there are so many facilities when you are working with the computer and there are so many different options that you can have, you can play around with so many different visual aids and programs that one tends to lose track of the real purpose behind actually including that visual aid. So you need to stay focused and you need to be clear that the visual aid that you are designing is actually serving the purpose that you wanted to solve and it is actually aiding the reader in their communication and in their understanding of the message. Now we are going to have a look at some guidelines for using visual aids in your business communication. First of all, you need to look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives. The first step in using visual aids effectively is to search actively for places where they can help you achieve your communication objectives. In your text, in your prose, you need to look for places where you can use visual aids to help you achieve your communication objectives. If you want to persuade someone, if you want to teach them a fact, if you want to discuss it, then according to that, which visual aids will help you achieve your discussion better and more effectively. You also need to use visual aids to show what something looks like in every field. People describe physical objects, machines, experimental apparatus, organs of animals, etc. So you know you will need to describe something or the other when you are doing your business writing. For instance, an engineer who designs a new hinge can explain the designs and its virtues to other engineers who might want to use it much better with diagrams, then he could do it with words. So similarly, if you need to describe something and describe what it looks like, then visual aids are very essential. They are very essential tool in helping you, in aiding you to describe the physical properties and the physicality of objects. Also, visual aids show how to do something. In many circumstances, visual aids provide the best form of instructions. In the previous lecture, we looked at instructions and we also talked about the fact that you will be using a lot of visual aids in your instructions. So apart from showing what something looks like, visual aids also show how to do something. They can, it is very easy to give instructions as a series of steps through visual aids. As we, the example I just mentioned, the airplane example where, what to do in an emergency, how to, how to exit the plane in an emergency is shown through a series of diagrams. Similarly, if you need to show people how to do something, then you can do that very easily through pictures. Obviously, since you are in a business like situation, you will probably be using a lot of prose in it as well, but to accompany the prose, you will have very essential diagrams. For example, if a writer needed to explain how to remove a piece of paper jammed in a photocopy machine, she could do it so much more effectively with the use of diagrams than with words. So similarly, there may be many situations where diagrams, illustrations, etc. can be much more useful in showing how to do something than words will be. You also use visual aids to show how something is organized. At work, you may need to describe the relationships amongst the various departments and divisions of your employer's company or among the parts of a computer system. In such a case, using diagrams can provide readers with an excellent understanding of the complex relationships. You could use a flowchart to show the relationships. You could use a table to show the different relationships or to show differences, etc. You will also be using visual aids to clarify the relationships among the market data. On the job, you may need to describe the relationships amongst various pieces of data, which may be from laboratory research, surveys, etc. Visual aids can help you make those relationships immediately clear to your readers using graphs and other visual techniques. You will also be using visual aids to support your arguments. You can present information in support of your persuasive points. For example, the manufacturer of a plastic insulating material can use visual aids like graphs to persuade greenhouse owners of the comparable effects of different kinds of plastics. So whatever arguments you are giving in words, you can use visual aids to support that data and actually to make your argument much more effective. Also, visual aids make detailed information easy to find. Sometimes there is a lot of information that you need to give and if you use visual aids, then it becomes easy for the readers to actually find that information. For many tasks, visual aids are much easier than pros for readers to use and for readers to understand. For example, a manufacturer of a photographic film wants to inform trainees of the length of time they should leave the film in the developer solution. Since the time depends on several factors like tank size, temperature, etc, the information can be conveyed effectively by using a simple table. Now, some guidelines that you need to keep in mind when making the visual aids. Obviously, you will keep in mind all the purposes that we talked about, but you need to remember that to take full advantage of the powerful systems that visual aids can provide. You need to begin by searching for places to use them when you're making the very first plan of your writing. Early planning will help you coordinate your pros and your visual aids from the beginning and then thereby you will reduce the amount of time that you will spend on revision. If you haven't made a plan in the beginning, then you will have to make a place for visual aids in revision. You will have to fit in the visual aids, so it's better that you first decide a little bit on the planning stage, where and where, to explain which things you will take visual aids from, where and where you will put your visual aids with your pros so that you can structure your communication. Although visual aids can help you immensely, you should guard against putting them in thoughtlessly and mindlessly. Be sure that each visual aid is designed to achieve its specific purpose. Once you have decided where to use visual aids, you must decide which type of visual aid to use. First of all, when you are planning, you must decide where to use visual aids. When you have determined a place to clarify this information with visual aids, then you must also see which types of visual aids you will use. Every visual aid is not for every purpose. First of all, the objectives of your visual aid. Thinking about those objectives in exactly the same way as you think about the objectives of your overall communication. You need to identify the task you want the visual aid to enable your readers to perform while reading your visual aid and then decide how you want the visual aid to affect your reader's attitudes. Now, how do you consider your reader's tasks? Different visual aids are suited to different reading tasks. Often the same information can be presented in many different ways. That is why you need to be aware of the purpose of your communication. You need to be aware of the purpose of using a particular visual aid in that particular communication. You also need to be aware of keeping in mind that purpose, what visual aid you will use. Let's have a look at the example of Ben who collected information on the starting salaries of people who graduated from three different departments in university. Now, which visual aid should he use? Ben wants to show you how the starting salaries of people who graduated from three different departments are available. You can see this information in different ways. If Ben's purpose is simply to enable the readers to learn the average starting salary of the graduates, he could use a table. If Ben wants them to be able to see at a glance how the average starting salary in their department compared with those in that same year from other departments, he could use a bar graph. If Ben wants his readers to be able to see how the average starting salary in their departments changed over the years and if he wants to compare that change with the changes experienced by other departments, he could use a line graph. Line graph make a trend over the years. Although the information will be the same, the mode of expressing that information will change depending on the purpose of that communication. In addition to thinking about your readers' tasks, you should also look to pick the type of visual aid that most quickly and dramatically communicates the evidence to support your persuasive point. For instance, showing the effect of a decrease in revenue in a line graph is much more suitable than a tabular form which requires the readers to do a lot of subtracting to appreciate the extent of the decrease. Useful or persuasive unless we use the ones that the readers know how to read. So we need to consider the readers' knowledge as well and the readers' attitude. How is the reader likely to react when faced with a particular type of a visual aid? Although there are some visual aids that are familiar to us all like biographs, pie charts, etc., there are other visual aids which are much more specialized. So when you are using specialized visual aids, keep in mind your audience's knowledge as well and your audience's attitude when being confronted with such a visual aid. Although these visual aids which are not familiar to readers, the unfamiliar visual aids may be very informative if there are symbols or specific inventions they are used. They might be very useful but they are only useful for an audience who will understand them. For other audiences, it will just baffle them. So try to avoid using non-conventional visual aids unless you are very sure that your readers won't actually understand them. Be especially careful to avoid making the mistake of assuming that your potential readers know how to read specialized figures. Don't just assume that they know. You need to make your visual aids easy to understand and easy to use. Having chosen the type of visual aid you use, you must design it yourself. When doing that, remember that like your prose, your visual aids should be easy for your readers to understand and use. The most important step in designing visual aids that are easy to understand and easy to use is to imagine that your readers are in the act of actually using the visual aid. So design your visual aids to support your readers' tasks. Design them to make it easy for the reader to understand them. Remember that you're not only trying to display information but you're also trying to help your readers understand and use that information. So keeping that in mind, keep your visual aids simple, avoid the temptation of cramming too much information into your visual aids. Sometimes two or three visual aids can communicate the same information more effectively than one visual aid. If you find it confusing for the reader, then watch it for a minute and see which information you can use to reduce it. You can express it in some other way. You can express it through some other visual aid. If you break down one visual aid and give it two or three visual aids instead, then it might be better to cram all information into one visual aid. Simplifying visual aids means that you are removing unnecessary details. So you should do that as well. You can either split up the detail into different visual aids so that you're giving all that information but it's in small doses or you can even delete some information if you feel that it might be unnecessary. Like unnecessary words, intros or superfluous details in visual aids create extra unproductive work for readers and they obscure the really important information. So you will need to delete any unnecessary information that there might be in your diagrams or charts. You will find great variation from situation to situation in the kind of details you need to eliminate. The general procedure however remains the same. Find and eliminate any details not needed to understand and use your visual aid. You also need to label the important content clearly. While it's important for you to eliminate unnecessary details from your visual aids, it is also crucial to include labels for the important content. Labels will help people know what they are seeing when they read a figure or a diagram or a chart. To create labels, first determine what parts need labelling. In some cases, it's easy to determine this. For instance, every row and column usually needs a heading. In other cases, you should label every part that your readers will need to find in a particular visual aid. So basically, you need to avoid labelling parts that your readers will not be looking for. You will only label the parts that your readers will be looking for. And make it difficult to understand and difficult to use. And that is something that we don't want to do. Some visual aids don't even need labels. For instance, the title of your visual aid will make it clear what the important parts are. After deciding which parts need a label, choose the appropriate word or words and place them where they're easy to see. If readers might be unsure what part is identified by the label, draw a line from the label to the part so that the connection becomes immediately clear. You also need to provide informative titles to your visual aids. Titles help your readers find the visual aids that they're looking for and they also help them to know what the visual aids contain and when they actually find them. To help your audience understand and use your visual aids, you should make the descriptive part of your titles as brief yet as informative as possible. If the title is brief and informative, then it becomes very easy for the reader to understand what it is that the visual aid is about. Titles typically include both a number and a description. Visual aids are numbered consecutively either in one long sequence through the entire communication or with a new sequence in each chapter. So you will decide whether you want to use one long sequence through the entire communication where even though the visual aids are in different chapters, you just continue the numbering or whether you will start from the number one in every chapter. According to custom, the numbers assigned to figures are usually Arabic while numbers assigned to tables are either Arabic or Roman. Conventions about where to place the titles also varies. In title written communications, titles are always, almost always placed above the table and below figures. So if it's a table, then the title is above that and if it's a figure, then the title is below that when your communication is type written. Generally also, the titles are centered between the margins. So they will be in the center of the margins of your visual aid. Within a single typeset communication, all tables share a consistent placement of titles and even also figures share a consistent placement of titles. This basically means that however whether you're placing your titles above the table or below the table or above the figure or below the table, you will continue to do the same for all the tables and all the figures in your communication. If you are writing below, then everyone will write below but the way you choose, you should have a consistency in your format. Then reports, proposals and instruction manuals sometimes have special tables of content that list the number, title and location of each individual visual aid. Because if there is a lot of visual aid that is made and there is a long communication, then they also have a list or a content page that is told in the list of tables and figures. You should note that sometimes you don't need to provide a title for a visual aid. This happens for instance when you are including a very short table in your text in a way that makes perfectly clear what the table contains. Similarly, the visual aids and brochures are often untitled, though in reports and proposals you usually have titles. One important guideline is that you should resist the temptation to let your decisions about visual aids be determined by what you have handy or what you have done in some previous situation. If you do this, then your approach will become writer-centered, then you are looking at your convenience and that is why you are writing your communication according to this, not that you are looking at the understanding of the reader and the convenience of the reader. Therefore you should avoid taking a writer-centered approach to visual aids but try to take a reader-centered approach, take an approach that is most likely to be useful or persuasive to your readers. Don't rely on material that is handy just because it's more convenient. You also need to fully integrate your visual aids with your prose. Whatever visual aids you are using, you should be able to integrate them with the prose that you have written in your text. This means that there is something written in the text and there is another visual aid and there is no connection between them. You should integrate your text with your visual aids so that they work together harmoniously to create a single unified message. The three different ways in which you can do this, you can introduce your visual aid in your prose, or you can state the conclusions that you want your readers to know. You should also try to make your visual aids easy to find so that you can easily find them. Now introducing your visual aid in your prose, let's talk briefly about this aspect. When people read sequentially through a written communication, they read one sentence, then the next, then the read one paragraph, then the next and so on. When you want the next element of the read to be a visual aid, rather than it being a sentence or a paragraph, then you will carefully direct the reader's attention to that visual aid. So you will steer your readers from your prose to the visual aid to indicate that this is now what they will be seeing next. Sometimes your introduction to a visual aid will have to include information that your readers or listeners need in order to understand or use the visual aid. Whatever kind of introduction you make to a visual aid, place it at the exact point where you would like your readers to focus their attention to it. You can also steer the conclusions you want your readers to draw from the visual aid. Remember that a visual aid presents your readers with a set of facts and unless you tell your conclusions, unless you tell the readers what conclusions you are making or what conclusions you want them to draw from the facts, they may draw a different one than the one that you want them to draw. So you need to point out the conclusion to them so that your conclusion and their conclusion can be the same. Consider for example, the way a writer discussed a graph that showed how many orders he thought his company would receive for its rubber houses over the next six months. The graph that he used showed that there would be a sharp decline in orders from automobile plants and the writer said that his readers might focus on that fact. So he wrote the following section to steer them to his point. As figure 7 indicates, our outlook for the next six months is very good. Although we predict fewer orders from automobile plants, we expect the slack to be taken up by increased demand among auto parts outlets. So here although the decrease in orders from automobile plants is obvious in the graph, the writer skillfully used that, but showing that that is not the main concern, that he's acknowledged that decrease, but he wants to highlight something else. He wants to highlight the increase amongst the auto parts outlets. So he's talked about that. You might find it helpful to think of the sentences in which you explain a visual aid significance as a special kind of a topic sentence. You need to remember that the sentences in which you explain the visual aid significance are just like the topic sentence at the head of a paragraph. Like the sentence where you can tell what will follow. Similarly, you will use a sentence that will tell what conclusions you have made. Now a third thing that we talked about was making your visual aids easy to find. What happens when your readers come to a statement in which you ask them to look for a certain visual aid? Instead of going on to read the text, they start looking for the visual aid. They stop reading, their mind stops concentrating on the prose, and their mind starts concentrating on where the visual aid is. You would want them to have one but search for the visual aid to be as short and as simple as possible so that they can concentrate on the content of your visual aid and the content of your text rather than wasting their time and energy looking for the visual aid. So therefore you should put your visual aid where your readers can locate it quickly. The ideal location for a visual aid is on the same page as the prose that accompanies the visual aid. You should also put your visual aid on the same page so that when the readers find that you are looking at this table, their table will be in front of you. Not only will this make the visual aid easy to find, but your readers will be able to look back and forth between the prose and the visual aid if necessary. However, you may not always have room for the visual aid on the same page as the prose that is accompanying it. If your communication has text on facing pages, then you can do that if there is not space on the same page. If your communication does not have facing pages, try to put the visual aid on the next page following the introduction. If there is no space on the same page, then you can include the visual aid on the next page. If you place your visual aid further away than that, for example in an appendix, then you can help your readers by providing the number of the page on which the aid is to be found. For example, you can say a detailed sketch of this region of the new building's floor plan is shown in figure 17 in Appendix C page 53. The page number you can see in the brackets. So in conclusion, visual aids can greatly increase the clarity and impact of your written communication. To use visual aids well, you need to follow the same reader-centered approach as you would when writing your prose. Just as you write a prose, keep an eye on your readers. Just as you use visual aids, keep an eye on your readers as well. Because this will enable you to decide where to use your visual aids, how to write them effectively and integrate them successfully in your prose. In this lecture today, we learnt to look for places where visual aids will help you achieve your communication objectives. We learnt to choose visual aids that are appropriate to our objectives. We also learnt the importance of using visual aids which are easy to understand and use and how to do that. And finally, we talked about integrating your visual aids with your prose. How to connect your visual aids with your prose? How to show their relationships? And what is the purpose of your connections? With this, we come to the end of today's lecture on the use of visual aids in all types of business and written conversations. If you have any queries, please feel free to contact us. Until next time, Allah Hafiz.