Micheal J. Klein and Kristi L. Shackelford’s essay Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom explains the benefits of employing smart design choices in your document. Employing these can make the ideas you put on your page more navigable and visually appealing to the reader.
Klein and Shackelford introduce the importance of proper typeface and how the use of imagery improves the impact of the ideas in your writing but also how integrating four key design elements contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity can positively affect the overall design of the document. They also instruct the reader on how to apply these same design elements to their own work. Since MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting is the standard for English academic writing they make sure to inform the reader on how to apply this standard format to their own text.
Throughout this essay Klein and Shackelford employ almost all of the design elements that they mention. For example they employ alignment and repetition when it comes to their headings and subheadings. Their headings are bold and aligned in the center of the page and the subheadings are bold and aligned to be on the left side page. Beneath the subheading “Design Elements” are four sections each dedicated to the previously mentioned four key elements, which are aligned like a subheadings but what sets them apart is that instead of being bold they are italicized. I think it’s clever of the writers of this paper not only to tell us how to design a document but show us how to design a document by making the text itself an example.
Leave a Reply