Paragraph Design

Over the past year or so, I've been involved in a redesign of my church's website. About three months ago, we added a professional web designer to the design team. I know, this sounds like an obvious move that was made too late in the process.

My church has an ethos of activating the talents of those in the community, so we were working with the graphic designers, writers, and programmers that we had. All of us are good at what we do, even getting paid to do that work in other contexts, but we'd never done work quite like this site redesign before.

When the professional web designer moved to Tucson and joined our church, he acted as a catalyst. His expertise plus some deadlines on the part of our resident programmer (who is in grad school at the UofA) zoomed us along. The site is now foundationally complete, and we're taking it live this week.

One point in the design process made me think specifically about the role of the professional designer who has an eye for each element in the design and how that connects to what I do in teaching writing. It all had to do with capital letters.

The design used headers on each page in all-caps. When we received the code for the design and began implementing each piece, I suggested changing those to title casing (That Means Like This) instead. In my world, the world of words on paper, THIS LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE YELLING AT SOMEONE, and I didn't want that, so we switched THIS to This. I didn't think anything of it once we did so and went on to other updates.

When the pro jumped back into the conversation, he explained why THIS should remain as THIS and not switch to This. Basically, his argument boiled down to viewing the header as a design element: not a word in itself, but a "readable shape" that tells people where they are in the hierarchy of information without them even needing to read the word. That means, before they read THEOLOGY, they see a readable rectangle at the top of the page that orients them to be able to easily understand the info.

I know, it may not seem like a big deal, all-caps or not, but I saw the function in action. After the pro explained the purpose of uppercasing the headers, I went back to look at the site. He was right. The title casing headers blended right into the other text on the page (now that we had more text on the pages, it was easier to see). There was no direction from the design, no nail to hang the picture on, I suppose.

I told him that I understood what he meant and we switched the headers back to all-caps. I didn't elaborate on my understanding all that much because we had other work to do, but I saw his perspective, his world of elements of design. Each piece played a part in directing users to receive info in some way or another. The choices he made were not shots in the dark. He knew why they were there.

I related this perspective back to my world of words on paper, and came up with this: paragraph design. Students need to know more about this. I've had a theory for awhile that teaching students how to construct paragraphs is a tipping point* in their writing education, and now I think they may need to think more about how to design and paragraph than construct one.

The switch from construct to design is more about how they view the elements**. Instead of constructing with concrete building blocks that are difficult or nearly impossible to change after they are in place, they are working with more fluid design elements that can always be assessed terms of playing their part in communication.



In a Writing 100 class once, I played the intro from Stranger Than Fiction to show the students how the graphic interface represents how this particular man views his world. Then I showed them an academic essay with Points highlighted in pinks, Illustration highlighted in yellow, and Explanation highlighted in green to show them how their teachers view their essays. I wanted them to see that their instructors had a particular way of viewing their writing. As Harold Crick's calculations showed up in his head as he moved about his world, certain pieces of their essays stood out in certain ways when their teachers saw their essays.

This was the first foray into exploring the design of a paper, but I didn't know it was exploring the design. This is something I'm going to keep exploring. I think it's important to not only look at what we are teaching, as in certain concepts that always come up in our courses, but to look at how we are enabling students to work with those concepts. I want a student to not only know that their paragraph needs to begin with a claim***, but how to choose the words to make that first sentence an effective claim. To design that sentence to play its part in what the paragraph is communicating. When students start to do that, they will think about what needs to be in that sentence so others can understand the paragraph instead of just trying to write a good sentence that makes sense to them.

I don't know where this is going to go, but that's often where I have the most fun with ideas.

*I take this term from Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book about trends and use it in a sense that when they understand how to construct a paragraph properly and it's place within the context of an entire academic essay, they will go from being unable to write an academic essay to being able to write an academic essay. It's not quite his usage, but I mean that they tip from No to Yes.

**I also think there may be some cultural capital, some element of uplifting the student from "student writer who thinks they are terrible at writing" to a fresh role as a designer. Designers are cool. Designers get movies made about them. Writers are communicators, and the kind of writing we ask students writers to produce requires that they take on the role of the expert. Many of them don't feel like experts, so their writing reflects the shyness or weakness they are operating out of. Anything we can do as educators to change that is worth their time.

***I used Point, Illustration, and Explanation earlier, but those are often referred to as Claim, Evidence, and Explanation on my campus. Either way works for me.