Communications Writing and Design

The Integrated Manual for Marketing, Advertising, and Public Relations

John DiMarco

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119118923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño gráfico

Communications Writing and Design is an integrated, project-based introduction to effective writing and design across the persuasive domains of communication.

• Build a strong foundation of core writing and design skills using professionally-designed examples that illustrate and reinforce key principles
• Readers learn and analyze techniques by creating 15 projects in marketing, advertising, PR, and social media with the help of strategy suggestions, practical tips, and professional production techniques
• Written by an experienced professional and teacher, with a focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary communication work
• Learning is reinforced through a variety of pedagogical features: learning objectives, helpful mnemonics, real-life projects and applications, chapter references for further study, and end-of-chapter summaries and exercises

A companion website with multimedia slides, exam questions, learning videos, and design guides provides additional learning tools for students and instructors

1
The Connectivity between Research, Writing, and Design

By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be transcribed into language.

Michel Foucault 1994

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Chapter objectives

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

• understand differences and connections between a text, a document, and a work.
• analyze how research and writing unites with design.
• evaluate signs to determine their value on communication.
• create a semiotic sign system to communicate an idea.

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1.1 The anatomy of a text, a document, and a work

Let us begin by establishing a simple view of how research, writing, and design collide in creating communication for mass audiences by relating the collective analytical thoughts of sociologists, linguists, writers, designers, information scientists, and philosophers.

French researcher, sociologist, and author Roland Barthes (Barthes and Miller 1975, 64) called text “tissue”, which he explains as “a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden meaning (truth)” and he purports that “text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving”. The perpetual interweaving of text in modern mass communication represents the endless, interdependent relationship between research, writing, and design. In the information science world, three main items represent the things we research, write and design; they are a text, a document, and “a work”. The text is the sets of words that create writing. The document is the physical container where the text is recorded, and “a work” is the set of ideas embedded “into a document using text with the intention of being communicated to a receiver” (Smiraglia 2001, 3–4). In advertising, for example, we see this in writing lines of copy (text), that then go into individual advertisements (document), which then go into a campaign (a work). In book publishing, the lines of words become the text, while the text becomes the documents in the form of chapters and sidebars, and the chapters, front matter and indexes become the work in the form of a completed book that communicates a set of ideas.

Figure 1.1 From Complex to simple. Text, document, and work are the result of research, writing, and design. Illustration by John DiMarco.

1.2 Research

Research offers methods to perform inquiry and observation that yield questions, data, and theories. It becomes the starting point for making meaning about something and spawns a desire to define a problem, get ideas, and then ultimately create form (Lupton and Phillips 2011). Research can be formal (structured and systematic) or informal (loose and divergent) and scholarly, building knowledge for knowledge's sake, or corporate, building knowledge for commerce's sake. Regardless of the type of research we use, once we can make meaning and build data, then we can begin to represent our ideas in written form. Research offers more than just data gathering on a formal level. It ignites inspiration of new concepts or magnifies clarification of what we think we know, especially when ideas swirl around inside our heads. In communication design, research generates data (text) and data becomes food for generating content (document), thus designed into a final communication product (a work) for advertising, marketing, and public relations.

Figure 1.2 Data drives campaigns. The “Truth” campaign uses hard data in the form of statistics to persuade young adults to stop smoking. The website and ads encourage millennials to be the generation that disavows smoking by showing a statistical trend leaning to success and feasibility, thus empowering them as group to be seen as making a historical contribution to society. www.truth.com.

Data in action

Data generated by research and can be qualitative, which means that it is narrow, patterned, thematic, and represented by words or images. Alternatively, data can be quantitative, which is broad, statistical, generalized, and represented by numbers. Data is critical in public relations, advertising, and marketing as it drives business decisions and vital to creating targeted, persuasive content and messages. In these disciplines, the secondary research, survey methods, interviews, and the focus group become sources of hard data, which require numbers (quantitative), and patterned themes (qualitative) interpreted into meaning for communications. One example is the anti-smoking ads put out in the “TRUTH” campaign, which hammers the quantitative notion that only 7% of young adults smoke, and that this generation could be the one that can ensure that tobacco smoking disappears among that group.

1.3 Writing

When we write, whether it is an essay or advertisement copy, we are designing within a system. Writing uses either an ideographic system or a phonetic system (de Saussure et al. 2005). The ideographic writing system uses symbols. An example of this type of system is Chinese. The phonetic writing system is based on sounds, which occur in words built from letters in an alphabet that represent those sounds, such as with English. Both systems richly communicate ideas, generate stories, and persuade people.

The two writing systems differ in their basis. Ideographic systems such as Chinese rely sole on marks, whereas the phonetic system utilizes sounds.

Linguistic value

Graphic design authors Lupton and Miller (2008, 53) highlight Structuralism scholar Ferdinand de Saussure's principle of linguistic value as “the identity of a sign rests not in the sign itself, but on its relation to other signs in the system.” They cite the example of the sound cow. Saussure recognized that there is no link between sound and concepts, meaning that the signifier (the sound) does not adhere to the signified (the mental concept). The sign alone is empty; there is no natural meaning when we say cow in relationship to the image of a cow. Saussure distinguishes when we say the word cow, the sound only becomes recognizable within a system of the same words, like now, bow...