Chapters 18 and 19

Chapter eighteen of the Bedford Researcher is all about understanding how to use design principles for a document or presentation. It starts off by describing what design principles are, such as balance, emphasis, placement, repetition, and consistency. The chapter then goes on to explain how to use each principal to effectively portray the purpose of your project. The chapter explains how to use design to make your document more easily comprehendible for readers through organization and display of ideas. It also explains what types of design elements you can use, listing things like font, page layout, color, and illustrations.

As I have already said in a few chapter descriptions in the past, I feel like this was a really good reminder of some otherwise obvious information. In general I think people tend to look for balance in there documents to make them more understandable or to just make them look nice. The design of a document or presentation was always more of an artistic aspect and less of a tactic for making information comprehensible to readers. I think this will play a nice helpful role in the weeks to come when we have constructed our outlines and begun writing drafts of our presentations.


Chapter nineteen was a more in-depth continuation on chapter eighteen. It continues with the idea of designing documents and presentations, but specifies how best to construct your project depending on its original format, be it an essay, an article, a website, an oral presentation, a multimedia presentation, or a mix of a few. For each model it explains that you must consider your purpose and the expectations of your audience before applying design principles and then describes specific methods such as fonts size or color, picture placement, video or audio inserts, or the construction of note cards for oral presentation.

I expect that this chapter would be very helpful just for future reference. It gives a very in-depth play-by-play of techniques to use for all sorts of projects. In respect to the research project that we are constructing in class, I don't know that this is particularly useful since much of the chapter talks about formating projects but do not relate to constructing a document like the one we are working on. At least, not with the format of my paper, not that I can see.