Technical Writing

147

7

Using Graphical Elements

7.1 Breaking up the Monotony

Dull writing can lose the reader’s attention and diminish his understanding.

In Chapter 2 I discussed how humor and allegory can be used to enliven

your writing and hold a reader’s attention. But humor and allegory should

only be used sparingly.

A better way to hold a reader’s attention is with appropriate use of graphi-

cal elements. By graphical elements, I mean anything that is not just text.

Examples include gures, equations, photographs, and tables. I like using

graphical elements liberally because they can enliven the presentation,

enrich ideas, and alleviate the boredom of a dry, text-only presentation. Even

bullet lists help to change the reader’s pace and by breaking up a long run of

monolithic prose. This chapter addresses appropriate uses of these graphical

elements in technical writing.

7.2 Modeling Ideas with Graphics

Words, tables, gures, equations, and so on can be used to model any idea.

This doesn’t mean that modeling ideas with words or pictures is easy—you

know that writing can be hard. Creating good charts and writing equations

can sometimes be harder. The challenge is to nd the right techniques for the

ideas that you want to explain.

The front matter of my church’s missal lists an “Art Director,” yet there is

almost no visual art in the book except three infrequently appearing icons.

So, why does the missal need an “Art Director?” The answer is that seeking

the right mix of text and non-text elements is a work of design. In the mis-

sal there are hymns, prayers, music, scriptures, and notes. Finding the best

layout for all these elements is a form of art.

148 Technical Writing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists

If there are too many graphical elements in a piece of writing, the reader

becomes distracted as the ow of the narrative is lost. If there are too few

graphical elements, the reader’s attention can also be lost in overly long tex-

tual passages. Many concepts can be illustrated via drawings, mathematics,

graphs, lists, and so forth. But how do you obtain the right mix of text and non-

text elements in technical writing? And how are these items best arranged?

7.2.1 A Picture Is Worth 1,437.4 Words

You have heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but why not

1,437.4 words? Of course the cliché uses an arbitrary number because there

is no exact equivalence between a picture and ideas—but the point is that

pictures can be more effective and impactful than words alone in conveying

complex information.

As an example, consider the following discussion of trafc fatalities for

different countries:

In 1998 there were more than 1,170,000 reported trafc fatalities worldwide.

The number of trafc fatalities in poor nations was 8.7% higher than in

wealthy nations. China and Africa had the misfortune of leading the way

with more than 178,000 and 170,000 deaths, respectively. Of the wealthy

nations, those in Eastern Europe fared the best, with only 923 deaths.

This narrative only gives a tidbit of information about worldwide trafc

fatalities. To give a complete picture, I would have to go on with numbers

in textual form for many paragraphs. In addition to being hard to follow,

making the numbers interesting would be challenging without taking great

liberties of style that seem unwarranted.

Now consider Figure 7.1. This gure conveys more information and, I

contend, in a more compelling and easily digested way than the preceding

narrative description. The number of the fatalities per region, as depicted by

the boxes, grabs your attention and makes comparisons very easy.

But be aware that graphical representation can be used as a weapon to

shock the reader or misrepresent information to advance a hidden agenda. In

the case of Figure7.1, the whole story is not obvious because the chart gives

only gross fatalities, not fatalities as a percentage of population. India’s pop-

ulation in 1998 was estimated at 984,003,683, while China’s population was

1,236,914,658 during the same period (1998 CIA World Factbook). Computing

the number of trafc fatalities per 1,000 people in China and India, we get

0.01% versus 0.02%. India had twice the trafc fatality rate of China in that

year. Of course, there are deep underlying factors for this difference—dif-

ferences in mass transportation systems, roadways, population density, and

so forth that can be more easily described in words. Sometimes words are

better than pictures, although usually both together make the most powerful

exposition.