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Cognate Strategies

The cognate strategies are a series of visual strategies intended to help document creators produce work that best reflects the message they are trying to convey and ensure that documents are easily accessible and usable for the intended audience. It is important to understand the audience, purpose, and context of a document (often referred to as the Rhetorical Situation) before the writing or design process begins. The cognate strategies can be employed to maximize the efficiency of a document in regards to how well it speaks to its rhetorical situation.

The cognate strategies are often referred to as ways of promoting understanding. The word “cognate” refers to knowledge; the cognate strategies are techniques which allow the writer/designer to impart knowledge to their audience by way of design. In their book, Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators, Charles Kostelnick and David Roberts outline six cognate strategies, or ways of framing, expressing and representing a message to an audience. The cognate strategies are cross-disciplinary, they can be applied to writing, graphic design and other forms of visual communication.

Audience

Audiences don’t always make decisions or form opinions based on clear thinking. Audience understanding can be affected by words, colours, layouts, or other mediated forms of communication. Therefore, the writer or designer of a document can communicate their intended message by selecting some aspects to highlight and rejecting others.

The cognate strategies outline six strategic ways in which a writer or designer can alter their work in order to present the intended information clearly and effectively. Cognate strategies help the document creator answer important questions during the design process, such as "Will the audience understand the information in its current arrangement?" and "Are the key points of information emphasized?" These strategies act to ensure the document fulfills its purpose and delivers the intended message to the audience without obstacles.

Overview

Kostelnick and Roberts outline six cognate strategies:

• Arrangement
• Emphasis
• Clarity
• Conciseness
• Tone
• Ethos

While each cognate has its own role, the strategies can be summed up by dividing the cognates into pairs:

• Arrangement & Emphasis: strategies that relate to the visual structure and organization of the document
• Clarity & Conciseness: strategies that relate to the style and readability of the document
• Tone & Ethos: strategies that relate to the voice, credibility and impact of the document

Six Cognate Strategies

Arrangement

Arrangement means "order" and the clear organization of visual elements within a document so that readers can see their structure. Proper arrangement strategies will create a clear structure within the document which readers can easily follow. Print documents are generally arranged sequentially and hierarchically, whereas online documents are dynamic, depending on which links the user selects during reading. The placement of elements within a document suggests relationships - either parallel or hierarchical - among the units.

Example:

A designer can use a bullet-list to group the elements in the list together visually and ensure that the reader can understand the relationship between the elements. Figure 2 illustrates this visual relationship among elements in bullet-lists.

Emphasis

In any given communication, trying to ensure the efficiency of a document will demand that certain content within the document is of higher importance and therefore should receive more attention during the design process. Emphasis is a strategy of controlling the elements which stand out in a document.

Example:

A designer can emphasize a specific word in a document by altering the typeface, making font larger or smaller, or changing the colour of text.

Clarity

The strategy of clarity relates to how successful the visual language of a document is in helping the reader understand the intended message. Any design choice that facilitates readership can be considered strategic in terms of boosting the clarity of a document. Kostelnick and Roberts suggest the best way of ensuring clarity is to test the document with the intended users or readers.

Example:

A designer can employ the use of page numbers in a multi-page document to facilitate readership and add clarity to the document.

Conciseness

In the process of designing any given document, the designer will reach a point where including additional design elements will cease to help portray the intended message. Instead, adding more to the design will start to make the document look crowded or over-designed. The strategy of conciseness relates to the designers ability to identify this point in the design process. Employing the conciseness strategy in a document does not require that the visual elements are designed as minimally as possible, as this could result in an under-designed document which lacks visual interest.

Example:

A designer can chose to shrink a document to fit onto a single page rather than flowing over onto a second page. This keeps the document shorter and more concise.

Note: If the reader's understanding of the document has to be sacrificed in order to make conciseness choices, the strategy will backfire.

Tone

Tone is the general expression of a message. A writer's word choice reveals his/her attitude toward readers and the subject of the document. It is important to ensure the tone employed within the document matches its intended audience, purpose and context. Writers can enforce tone strategies by altering their use of syntax, point of view, diction, or level of formality in the document, while designers control tone by altering visual language such as the use of typeface and spacing.

Example:

A writer who is asking their boss for an extended deadline will employ a formal tone, as is necessary for a business email. A writer who is asking their good friend out to dinner will employ a casual tone.

Ethos

Ethos strategies relate to the idea that it is imperative for writers to cultivate a sense of character or credibility in their work which will appeal to their audience. Ethos of a document can depend on the authority and reputation of both the writer and the organization they work for. Ethos is dependent on the designer's attention to consistency, quality and details.

Example:

A university newsletter will feature the university's official documentation or logo, which have built-in credibility with the audience whom is familiar with the school (teachers, parents, and students).

Interdependence of Cognate Strategies

While they have been introduced individually, it is important to understand that all six cognate strategies must work together in a document in order to properly address the documents purpose and intended audience. Cognate strategies are interdependent; the designer must not alter one strategy without calculating the resulting effects on the other five.

Altering an element to create conciseness, for example, by removing an image in a document with several, will immediately alter the strategic arrangement of the document. Formatting certain portions of text in bold in order to create emphasis will alter the intended clarity of the document, and so on.

The influence of cognate strategies on one another can sometimes lead to “negative trade-offs” or “balancing acts” in which some level of negative design is kept in the final document in order to maintain a positive element of design elsewhere. Though the six cognates can be isolated for analysis, when implemented into any design the strategies are thoroughly interdependent.