Chapter 18 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Chapter 18 of Mike Palmquist's The Bedford Researcher, is all about how you can use design effectively and what design elements you can use. Palmquist starts off with how to understand design principles, including balance, emphasis, placement, repetition, and consistency; design for your readers by organization, recognizing function, and location of information and ideas; designing with a purpose; and design to address genre convictions. He also discusses what design elements you can use in your paper. Things like certain fonts, line spacing, and alignment are some of the most important elements a writer can use and should use; while, the use of page layout, colors, shading, borders, and rules (lines going either up and down or left to right on a page) are not as crucial to the writer. The writer's use of photographs, graphs, charts, tables, and other images or digital illustrations are great tools as long as you keep in mind that you need to use the illustration for a certain purpose; the placement near the text that it illustrates is crucial; and including a title or caption helps to explain the illustration. All in all, through out chapter 18 Palmquist makes a big deal about how your design will effect how your readers will react to and understand your paper.