This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Communicating without words
Another thing you can include in your document are graphics. Now graphics can be really powerful. This is about communicating without words.
If you’re going to use graphics in your document, make sure they actually aid the communication. They’re not there just for decoration.
Sometimes it’s really helpful to have some graphics in the document because it makes it much easier to explain concepts when people can see the ideas rather than trying to translate those into words.
So here’s an example. It’s much easier to see the relationship between the fillet on a dorsal fin of a shark and the fillet on a submarine if I see pictures of them. These are really difficult ideas to explain in words.
Here’s another example where a graphic has been used really well to aid the communication in a newsletter. So this photograph makes the content really concrete for people. They can see what it’s talking about. They can see somebody actually doing the sampling rather than just reading the words about sampling. The other thing I like about the way this has been used in this particular newsletter is the way they use the caption underneath the photo. They use their caption to actually tell the story. They didn’t do something dumb like Figure 5: Bloke sticking his finger in the creek. No they told the story of what was going on. That’s because for some of your readers, those who are more graphically oriented, they will be drawn to the pictures and they will likely look at those and also read the caption underneath the picture before they read the rest of the text. So that becomes really valuable real estate. Don’t waste that. Turning abstract ideas into concrete photographs or diagrams can be really helpful and aid the communication. It can help people engage with the document.
You can also use graphics to support words. For example, in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, there’s this idea of a controlled action. Now we decide whether it’s a controlled action by considering 2 dimensions, probability and consequence. So those ideas are explained in words as we talk about this act. But having a little diagram can help people say, Oh yes, there’s 2 dimensions I need to think through and I can see where the controlled action would fit.
Here’s another graphic that talks about abstract concepts. This is around the amount of pollution that a particular licensee emitted and how close they got to the daily limit. So we have this licensee A, who hardly pollutes at all, but one day they got it wrong and they got smashed cause they went over the limit. This is compared with somebody else who’s just always nudging that limit. They are actually polluting more. So that’s a way of explaining those concepts and this is what we wanted to address in this particular document.
Here’s another one here that talks about an abstract concept. This one came from a document on the Hunter River Salinity Trading scheme. This trading scheme is all based around blocks of water moving down the river. Now, if you travel to Newcastle and have a look at the Hunter River, you won’t see any blocks of water. These are abstract ideas. Difficult to explain in words. But when we put it into a diagram, it makes it very clear that this chunk of water is moving down the river and we want to make sure that we don’t load up each chunk with too much salinity.
You can use photos and pictures to tell stories. This one was telling the story of hey, when you come to design your workplace, make sure you do it in a way so that people don’t need to bend. Protect their backs.
And of course, you know, there’s a whole bunch of different diagrams you can use to show process flow or project management with a Gantt chart. Lots of those types of tools around, and they can make it really easy for people to visually see where things are. So it’s about visually communicating the information rather than just relying on words.
Communicating numeric information
Graphs, of course, are a great way of communicating and you they will often be useful in the documents that you produce. The beauty about a graph is that it translates a numeric value into a block of colour. So if I’ve got these two numerals, four and eight, I mean physically they look almost similar in some ways. I need to have some mathematical capability to recognise that one is twice the other. But if I translate those quantities into a block of colour ah, I can now physically see that one is twice the size of the other. So that can be really helpful when you’re talking about numeric information.
And of course, there’s lots of different graphs that you can use. You can use line graphs and column graphs and pie charts. Just choose the appropriate graph for the content that you’re wanting to communicate. One thing to be careful with graphs though, is to not make the graph too complex, not have too many things on the graph. Otherwise it becomes more of a puzzle to solve rather than a piece of communication.
So be really clear about the message that you want to get across in that picture or in that graph that you’ve provided for people.
So there’s those five things to do before it leaves your desk. The document should be as good as you can possibly make it before you pass it on to somebody else before it goes to a reviewer or an approval, or wherever else it goes in the organisation or outside the organisation. Make sure it’s as good as you can make it before it moves elsewhere.
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