Module 25 for June 27th

Module 25 is all about using visuals.  When forming a rough draft of your document, you should use visuals to see if your ideas are presented completely, to see their relationships, to make points vivid, to emphasize, to prevent repetition, and to focus on information decision makers need.  According to the text, each visual tells a story.  Good stories support your ideas.  To find stories in your visuals you can focus on a topic, simplify the data, and look for relationships and changes.  There are many types of visuals and they are: tables, pie chart, line graph or bar chart.  It's important to note that you should only use tables when you want the audience to focus on specific numbers.  Pie charts are used to force the audience to measure area.  Also, bar charts are easy because they ask people to compare distance along a common scale.  There are also grouped bar charts, which allows you to measure different aspects of each item.  On the other hand, you could have segmented, subdivided, or stacked bars, deviation bar charts, paired bar charts, and even histograms or pictograms.  Lastly, we have line graphs, which are convenient to use when needing to compare two variables.  So, should you use color and clip art?  It does grab attention, but it also causes two issues.  The first issue is that the reader may try to interpret colors and their meanings when there may not be an intended interpretation for the colors used.  Secondly, color may have different meanings if interpretation is intended.  So basically, colors are complicated!  Clip art can be good, but you have to make sure you don't have chartjunk, which is when the clip art doesn't relate to the information in your document.  When using visuals you need to make sure you always double check all intended meanings and make sure your information is accurate.  I think it's important that you make sure that each visual is appealing, while also making sure that it is very user friendly, otherwise it would be pointless!!  And FYI, you can use the same visual more than once in your document, if the visual is simple.