Instruction Manuals: Illustrations

Anne Lehrndorfer

Internationalisation and diminishing reading skills have led to a decline in the need for textual information in documents meant for public use. This has also led to the need for higher quality pictorial illustrations used in such documents. This trend is evident in the field of technical communication too - with a marked increase in the number of documents which have less textual and more self-explanatory non-text units, which target a larger audience and lead to shortened times spent on reading, grasping and making use of the information that is conveyed.