Practical models for technical communication - Shannon Kelley 2021

Visual misrepresentation
Technical communication ethics

Images are a common form of information that can be misleading, as you saw earlier with the graph about alpaca attacks. Before you create a graph or insert clip art into a report, think about how your audience will interpret it.

See Chapter 3 for more on visual design.

Figure 2.4 is another visual example of information distortion. The person who created this chart may not have intended to distort or misrepresent the information. But, as a professional, you need to provide information in a way that allows your user to draw reasonable conclusions. A student looking at this chart might assume Professor C is a better teacher or an easy grader. But what if the difference is that Professor A is part-time and Professor C is full-time? There’s no way to know for sure how this information should be interpreted. Leaving out pertinent information is not just sloppy. It can lead to real consequences.

Other ways to distort information involve the document itself. One of the most common culprits is the three-dimensional pie chart (figure 2.5). Compare Item A with Item C. How different are they in size? It’s hard to tell in this chart, isn’t it? But in the flat chart, it is clear that Item A is more than twice the size of Item C. Now, look at Items D and B. They’re both the same percentage, but the chart’s three-dimensionality distorts visual understanding of the ratios. As a result, Item D looks much larger than B. It looks like it is over fifty percent of the graph. The whole idea in a pie chart is to demonstrate how a whole is divided into parts. The three-dimensional graph may look sleek, but it doesn’t give a clear representation of the data.