Unit 1 Concepts

Question 1

Professional Writing

Answer 1

writing that is information-based, action-oriented, and audience- (or user-) centered.

Question 2

Document Design

Answer 2

the material and visual shaping of pages so that they achieve their rhetorical purposes.

Question 3

Genre

Answer 3

a conventionally defined type or kind of cultural expression.

Question 4

Genre Knowledge

Answer 4

refers to our (often implicit) understanding of the conventions that govern the many different types or kinds of documents we read. Our expectations about what these kinds of documents typically do play a major role in how we read them.

Question 5

Tone

Answer 5

the concept we use to describe a reader’s sense of a writer’s attitude toward two things: the reader and the subject the writer is discussing.

Question 6

Encoding

Answer 6

the process of making meaning out of perception and writing it into the brain.

Question 7

bottom-up processes

Answer 7

biological encoding process

Question 8

top-down processes

Answer 8

an encoding process which is cultural and which draw on your prior experience

Question 9

saccades

Answer 9

the small, jumpy movements that eyes make as they focus the fovea

Question 10

fovea

Answer 10

the eye’s perceptual center

Question 11

ISR

Answer 11

first thing readers do when they look at a document–immediate subjective reaction—basic judgments about like/dislike, easy/hard to read, and so on

Question 12

HOI

Answer 12

The second of the first two things–determine the hierarchy of information (HOI) the document expresses—a sense of what’s most important, what’s next most important, and so on.

Question 13

gestalt

Answer 13

a form or process of perceiving by which a viewer interprets and encodes the visual, attempting to form a meaningful whole out of many individual parts.

Question 14

Three important gestalts

Answer 14

Figure- ground contrast, proximity, and similarity

Question 15

Emphasis

Answer 15

what sets elements of a document apart as more or less important in relation to each other.

Question 16

focal point

Answer 16

the point to which the reader’s eye is first drawn

Question 17

Contrast

Answer 17

all the general ways in which something is made to appear different than something else on the page.

Question 18

Unity

Answer 18

all elements in a document relate to each other, cooperating to create a sense of completeness and order.

Question 19

anomaly

Answer 19

anything that doesn’t belong

Question 20

Balance

Answer 20

refers to how weight is distributed in a document. (A document is symmetrically balanced when all parts of the page appear to have equal weight. A document is asymmetrical when one or more parts are clearly heavier than others.)

Question 21

Sequence

Answer 21

the order in which elements of a document are presented, or the order in which they are intended to be read.

Question 22

rhythm

Answer 22

when the reader is able to follow its sequence clearly, from one element to the next, without distraction or confusion.

Question 23

Noise

Answer 23

refers to anything in the design of a document that distracts a reader from finding a document’s intended meaning or from accomplishing its intended purpose.

Question 24

CUBES

Answer 24

Contrast, Unity, Balance, Emphasis, Sequence

Question 25

CRAP

Answer 25

Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity

Question 26

Repetition

Answer 26

helps bring consistency and unity to the page. (he longer the document is, the more critical it is to create consistency and unity through the use of repeated elements.)

Question 27

Alignment

Answer 27

refers to the way that design elements relate to each other spatially on the page.

Question 28

Rhetorical Situations

Answer 28

Think of the triangle. The three points of the triangle are author, audience, message/purpose. Inside the triangle is genre. Surrounding it all in a circle is Common culture. When addressing a document we must take all of these into consideration.