Form and Document Creation

Form and Document Creation is one of the things that technical communicators do as part of creating deliverables for their companies or clients. Document design is: "the field of theory and practice aimed at creating comprehensible, persuasive and usable functional documents". These forms and documents can have many different purposes such as collecting or providing information.

Eva Brumberger, an instructor in the professional writing program at Virginia Tech, surveyed professional writers about the nature of their work in order to evaluate what student writers are taught before entering the work force. These professional writers confirmed that their role has developed past the verbal communication dominant in the literature presented to students and has developed into mostly visual communication.

Technical communicators must take data and convert it into information; this process is known as visualization, or visual communication. Because of the widespread use of digital media, modern technical communicators must also now think about visualization as it relates to digital forms and documents. Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, editors of the book Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, define visualization as the: "use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition". Though many forms and documents will still have a paper copy for distribution, most forms and documents are now utilized online in some fashion; this is why there is such focus on the computer-supported representations for maximal cognition. Brumberger defines visual communication as: "designing print, Web, and multimedia documents…creating visual displays of information/data, generating other visual material…and any other communication tasks which rely on visual language".

There are many areas where professional writers utilize visualization. It is most useful in the following areas: complex documents, statistical and categorical data, personal services, and histories.

Visual communication responsibilities include: designing visual content, determining when to use visual material, modifying existing material, and applying templates that already exist to material.

Visual communication tasks include designing: presentations, print documents, page layouts, images, and data displays.

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