Design for Print and Digital Writing

In the ancient Greek world, a speaker’s delivery (known as actio) was an art every educated person needed to master: how a speaker delivered a speech—tone, pace, volume, use of gestures, and so on—had a great impact on the message and how it would be received. In the age of (mountains of) information, as Professor Richard Lanham points out, it’s increasingly difficult to get and hold people’s attention. As a result, we are returning to the ancient art of delivery. But writers now have many tools that writers and speakers in the ancient world did not have to help them get and hold an audience’s attention, from font options to color and video. All these tools help bring the dimension of visual rhetoric to today’s writing.

Chapter contents:

Quick Help: Using visuals and media effectively

Choosing a type of text

Planning a visual structure

Formatting print and digital texts

Considering visuals and media