The principal obligation of the editor charged with editing visual media is to understand the strengths and the limitations of both text and visuals so as to make informed media choices. The paper compares and contrasts visual and verbal media in an effort to provide the reader with some practical guidance in making media choices. The paper also offers a set of practical guidelines for the use of visuals that is intended to ensure that the visuals chosen and their utilization result in both efficient and effective communication of the kinds of ideas best suited to presentation in pictorial form.

It is pointed out that writers and editors have powerful formatting and typographical tools available in word processing and desktop publishing software that can be applied to headings to visually reveal or signal the structure of text, and thus the author's perspective. Results of studies are presented which suggest that (1) visual discriminations among headings are easier for a reader to make when headings vary on fewer rather than more formatting and typographical dimensions, (2) size is the most powerful visual cue to a heading's hierarchical position, (3) relative size differences among different levels of headings of about 20% are more discriminable than are absolute size differences, and (4) formatting cues are perceived by readers consistently but not necessarily conventionally.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

In The Nurnberg Funnel, J.M. Carroll (1990) reviews and reformulates his research on minimalism, a well-known approach to both print and online software documentation in which explicit instruction is severely reduced and users learn through a predominantly exploratory process. The authors examine the book and conclude that although it is stimulating and valuable, Carroll fails to make a compelling case of minimalism as a broadly applicable alternative to the contemporary multicomponent documentation set.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

An empirical study was conducted to explore text editing performance in an actual work environment. The text editing performance of 12 experts and 24 novices was studied across several benchmark tasks using either a command-driven, PC-based or hard-wired text editing system. Experts were tested for performance and functionality; novices were tested for learning. Additionally, the keystroke-level model was applied to the performance tasks and the results compared to actual observations. The results indicated that the methodology of T. Roberts (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford Univ., CA, USA, 1980) could be easily applied to a work environment and provided useful information for the evaluation of text editing systems. The study identified several areas of the keystroke-level model that could be modified to provide a more accurate assessment of text editing performance.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>