Document Design - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2000

We do not become conscious of all the stimuli detected by our sensory organs. The selective process that controls our awareness of events in the environment is called attention. The process of attention determines which events we become conscious of. Attention may be controlled (1) automatically, (2) by instructions, and (3) by the specific demands of the particular task at hand. The information designer may use various design principles and guidelines in order to facilitate the reader’s attention processes, and subsequent processes for understanding and learning.

Examination papers have until now received little attention in the field of document design. Although this theoretical framework and the domain of application may not be a perfect match, the principles of document design could have some heuristic value in the domain of assessment in education. The poor results of a group of South African technical college students from certain cultural and educational backgrounds merited an investigation into the diagnostic and remedial value of these principles. In this contribution examination papers are situated within a general model for problem-based text evaluation, representative of current thinking in document design. At a more specic level criteria for assessment in education are identied and validated as criteria for examination papers in particular. These criteria are mapped onto the textual elements of documents and represented in an evaluation matrix. The applicability of the matrix is demonstrated through the analysis of a selection of examples from national examination papers for career-oriented college subjects. It is suggested that any pretesting - text-focused, expert-focused or reader-focused - be preceded by thorough planning, taking cognizance of the macro-context of problem-based document design, valid micro-contextual criteria, and appropriate research methods. The outcomes should yield useful dividends at a practical as well as an academic level.

The advertising frameworks developed by Hall and Maclay (1991) and Franzen (1994) can be seen as capturing the strategies used most frequently by today’s advertisers. Although based on extensive practical experience, their empirical basis has hardly been touched upon in academic research. To answer the question to what extent the advertising frameworks exist in practice, the authors conducted an exploratory study signifying the presence of such models. Based on an analysis of 16 commercials from the four largest Dutch banks (N = 1101), some frameworks proved to be more ’popular’ than others were. While for each bank a dominant framework could be identied, different banks employed different models. Within Financial Service Advertising, characteristics of the frameworks were found to affect the effectiveness of a campaign in different ways, sometimes facilitating one effect while impeding another. Also, more general content characteristics with regard to brand name and type of endorsement were found to signicantly influence advertising effectiveness.

Handbooks and consultants offer guidelines for customer-complaint reception which seem quite uniform across cultures. But one would expect different behavior patterns in different cultures. This paper describes a pilot investigation of this paradox. Four complaint-handling dialogues exhibiting different levels and types of politeness were written and shown to business students of various European nationalities, predominantly Danish and Spanish. The results showed that the Danes were much less tolerant of polite phrases and promotional language than the Spaniards, but that there was a ’concise, brief, sincere’ style acceptable to all cultural-national groups.

The ambiguity of the we-referent in internal communication documents can make text interpretation difficult. We analyzed the 1999 issues of the ’Maxi Guide’, the weekly top-down briefing of a large Belgian distribution chain. In relational and hybrid texts in particular, the referent of the pronoun often changes within the same text without any textual or graphic indicator.This article will first describe how the use of we is avoided. In total seven strategies were detected (e.g., perspective changes, non-finite clauses, elliptical sentences). They will be explained and illustrated with examples translated from both French and Dutch. Next, the article will outline how we itself operates as an evasive strategy. The examples will demonstrate how similar strategies are used in the two languages.