As working professionals, I’m sure most of us have seen that fun saying “I survived another meeting that should have been an email” on a plaque or coffee mug. No matter the nature of the job or the season of employment, of meetings must be had and there are people to socialize with. However much we wish it occurred more often, there are meetings and presentations that reveal themselves as totally worth the time and ultimately useful, helpful, and engaging. There may come a time when you have to decide if an email will suffice or not, and when a presentation is required, it is crucial to convey the information effectively and practically to truly resonate with your audience. Visuals play a central and divisive role in presentations and other professional documents, such as a recommendation report, and as such, we should be informed, critical, and actively engaged when creating and managing visuals in the career field. This blog post will aid in you in your quest of your own visual craftsmanship by identifying types of visuals relevant to the paralegal professional, and describing various ways to compose and present these visuals.
Why Visuals?
First things first: in order to effectively and succinctly compose visual representations of information, one must be exceptionally knowledgeable of the information so as to condense the factual and relevant information within the visual, map or graphic. Equally important, your audience should be able to look at the visual with little background information necessary. The visual should be individually informative and not just supplemental. When researching, analyzing, and organizing the information and content that you are presenting on, think critically about what type of medium, visual, software, or graphic would most effectually relay the information to your audience.
What types of visuals are out there?
In today’s world, the presentation of information within the professional setting has immense capabilities to reach and engage a vast and varying audience. Such capabilities are possible thanks to the always-improving technology available to professionals, but also because professionals are constantly learning about the technology and its impacts to rhetoric in the workforce Take for instance this bar graph from the U.S. Department of Labor’s article titled “Presenting Effective Presentations with Visual Aids”:
This bar graph is easily decipherable through the graph title, percentages, and categories. It will come to you as no surprise, however, that the article this bar graph is featured in was published in May of 1996!
Jason Pauley wrote an article titled “The Evolution of a Bar Chart: How I transformed my chart in a few easy steps”, and finally produced this bar graph:
This bar graph conveys a completely different message, but just goes to show the true evolution of technology, and how essential it is to acquire skills to create stunning and effective visuals. As professionals, adaptability is just as important as improvement.
To continue our analysis of the bar graph from the U.S. Department of Labor, I have included a graphic that displays information on specifically visuals in the online setting, but is still comparable to the aforementioned bar graph:
How are the graphic and bar graph comparable? While there are clear differences between the bar graph and the graphic with regards to the data and information, both visuals inadvertently represent the importance of visuals to the targeted audience. However, the graphic clearly conveys the importance of visuals to online success: that is, there is solid data supporting the subjectivity of the graph without any more explanation. In contrast, upon viewing the bar graph, the message of the visual may be up for interpretation. Yes, the data conveys definite statistics, but what is the underlying purpose of the graph? In his article about Text-to-Visual Remediation, Adam Breckenridge states:
Remember, your remediation should be an expression of your feelings about a particular text, but it should be rooted in an understanding of the original text, including the historical context out of which it came, and an application of rhetorical strategies—knowledge that that you should be able to eloquently defend in a reflection piece on the remediation.
This is exactly where efficacy come into play: while success of your visuals is rooted in the presentation and stylistic display of information, all the colors, fonts, videos, and pictures in the world will not cover up “bad” data and statistics from unreliable sources, or even the complete omission of relevant information.
Conclusion
No matter what type of learner you are or your profession, visuals are important whether you are creating them for other professionals or relying on them to complete your own work. As Edward Tufte wrote in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative information:
“Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”