Writing Guides Print-Friendly Page

Support Narrative

Illustrations can help support the narrative. They can help you make your points clearly by visualizing the information and showing information in different forms. Illustrations can support your narrative by succinctly presenting ideas that may have required hundreds of words.

Reduce Narrative

Depending on the project you're writing about, Illustrations can reduce your narrative length. Illustrations--drawings, photographs, tables, line graphs, and other visuals can replace dozens, if not hundreds of words in your narrative.

As you plan a document, develop your Illustrations after you've organized and outlined your document. Consider where you could replace the narrative with Illustrations.

Emphasize Key Points

When you're reporting on a lengthy topic, you'll often need to stress key points. By selecting the key points to illustrate and then placing them in a visual, you highlight only your most important points.

Visualize Information

At times providing Illustrations helps readers see points they would have otherwise missed. Different types of Illustrations can help readers see key points.

For example, a study exploring the impact of fencing to reduce grazing by livestock could present the information in both a table and photograph. The photography could help readers see what the data mean.

Summarize Data

If you're writing a research report based on large amounts of data, do not put raw data in your report. Instead, summarize the data in summary tables, line graphs or bar charts. Which you select depends on your intended readers and their ability to understand your data and read the respective kind of Illustration.

For example, if you are doing a study of radon levels in homes, you need not report the radon level from each home. Instead, you could report the mean, median, or mode from different homes in the different parts of your community.

Simplify Data

Different readers--i.e., audiences--have different abilities to read and interpret tables, data, and numerical information. You can often simplify data by converting numerical data to line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts.

Break Up Text

Review many newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, and you'll find that the graphic designers use Illustrations to break up text and add visual appeal. Lengthy passages of text create an overall gray impression. By adding photographs, line art, and typographical elements, graphic designers enhance the documents' overall visual.

Enhance Understanding

Readers and users think in different modes. Some people think in visuals, others think in words, still others think in combinations of text and Illustrations. Adding Illustrations helps some readers understand information more easier than reading text. And in some cases, you need only provide Illustrations--no text.

For example, some computer manufacturers provide only visual instruction sheets for cabling computers, keyboards, and monitors.

Add Visual Appeal

Illustrations often interest readers and viewers in a publication, article, Web site, or other communication product. In more general circulation publications, such as magazines, newsletters, annual reports, flyers, brochures, designers add Illustrations to enhance the visual attractiveness of a publication. A variety of techniques emerge--placement, size, color, and typographical features.