Writing isn’t always about the words, but about the placement of such words and how they combine into sentences, paragraphs, pages, and so on. To convey a message, one must properly design a document that encompasses all aspects of the desired meaning. In the article “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom” Klein and Shackelford describe the key characteristics of document design. These characteristics include text and type, images, and design elements. Incorporating these aspects into your writing will provide numerous benefits and ultimately enhance your writing in order to convey your message.
I believe that learning about document design is crucial to amplify an individual’s writing process. However, I also believe that these characteristics are somewhat second nature to us. Perhaps I feel this way due to having learned these skills in prior years of my education, but it seems obvious that the design of a document is vital to the information being conveyed in the text. Take for example, a book. A book cannot be a book without the basic format of how a book is designed. While each book is different in its design, more specifically the characteristics that compile into a document’s design, the base of each book is essentially the same. Although each base has a different style, whether it be a short story, a narrative, novella, etc. and within each style is a genre such as horror, fiction, mystery, thriller, or whatever it may be, the overall design of the document is the same for each book. The same goes for an article, a letter, a speech, poetry, or even this blog post. If you look at some of my previous blog posts, for example, “Technology Use in Classrooms,” you will notice that they are all formatted the same way. Each post discusses a varying topic about writing, but each has a wide range of information presented, and are all vastly different from each other.
It is in my opinion that document design is an aspect of writing that we develop overtime, and a rule of thumb that we subconsciously follow. A book would not be written in the format of a letter, for that would simply be a letter, or series of letters compiled together. We know the basics of document design, but the key characteristics must be developed further so as to improve one’s writing.
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