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Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers
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Author: Karen A. Schriver
List Price: $55.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0471306363
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (31 December, 1996)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 61,143
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together
For an author who believes in giving priority to readers, she actually does a rather poor job considering her reader. She is an academic and as such has the foible of wanting to put all her knowledge on display. So she's done little trimming and condensing of her material into a form that is really useful to readers who want to quickly get to core ideas about document design theory and practice.
The opening chapter abstracts are unnecessarily long, and just repeat what shortly follows in the body of the chapter. While I liked the way she put document design in a social and historical context, this could have been done much more succinctly. The long timeline is too tangentially related to what readers really want to know about, namely document design, to interest many of them. It seems included because the professor did a lot of research and just hated not to have more to show for it than a few succinct paragraphs.
Later chapters presenting the results of various reader response studies are interesting enough, but surely we could move more quickly to the results and their relevance to document design without spending so much time with dry narration of the actual empirical testing.
The theoretical section offers a long overview of theoretical approaches, arguing in favor of a rhetorical approach. Yet the chapters that go on to apply the theory offer advice and conclusions that hardly seem to warrant such a heavyweight theoretical foundation. For instance, the chapter on typography just offers familiar practical advice of the sort one gets in many introductory books on typography. The same is true about the long section about grids. All the opening theory favoring rhetorical approaches yields results that sound very close to the plain old common sense of the non-theoretical how-to craft school that gets debunked in the opening. So she does not end up making a very strong case for the value of her own theoretical approach, and we feel we waded through a lot of theory without much benefit.
In reality, I think she does have a case and she does have some good examples of how attending to the reader through empirical research can improve document design. But her ideas would be much more forcefully and usefully presented in 200 as opposed to 500 pages.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Terribly wordy - lots of deadwood
Sorry - I would not recommend this book to a TECHNICAL writer.This book has 559 pages and could be cut down to maybe 100 pages of useful information. Each chapter has a full page explaining the chapter... if you have to do that, you haven't planned and written the chapter well. A good product sells itself. It takes the author 5 pages in the preface to explain the book! It also has a lot of side head paragraphs explaining more... explaining the explanations. This book was painful reading for me... I kept thinking "bla bla bla bla bla" This book seems to have a lot of the author's opinions and theory, but not very much practical information.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Imaginative, fascinating, detailed
This book went far beyond my expectations and gave me a broad perspective on document design. Clearly this is one of the seminal books on writing and visual design. Schriver is imaginative in her content, fascinating with her examples, and detailed in her analysis. I found her writing to be excellent and I highly recommend this book.
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