Unit 1 Concepts Flashcards
Professional Writing
writing that is information-based, action-oriented, and audience- (or user-) centered.
Document Design
the material and visual shaping of pages so that they achieve their rhetorical purposes.
Genre
a conventionally defined type or kind of cultural expression.
Genre Knowledge
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.
Tone
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.
Encoding
the process of making meaning out of perception and writing it into the brain.
bottom-up processes
biological encoding process
top-down processes
an encoding process which is cultural and which draw on your prior experience
saccades
the small, jumpy movements that eyes make as they focus the fovea
fovea
the eye’s perceptual center
ISR
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
HOI
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.
gestalt
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.
Three important gestalts
Figure- ground contrast, proximity, and similarity
Emphasis
what sets elements of a document apart as more or less important in relation to each other.
focal point
the point to which the reader’s eye is first drawn
Contrast
all the general ways in which something is made to appear different than something else on the page.
Unity
all elements in a document relate to each other, cooperating to create a sense of completeness and order.
anomaly
anything that doesn’t belong
Balance
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.)
Sequence
the order in which elements of a document are presented, or the order in which they are intended to be read.
rhythm
when the reader is able to follow its sequence clearly, from one element to the next, without distraction or confusion.
Noise
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.
CUBES
Contrast, Unity, Balance, Emphasis, Sequence
CRAP
Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity
Repetition
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.)
Alignment
refers to the way that design elements relate to each other spatially on the page.
Rhetorical Situations
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.
