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Medical personnel usually write and design documents that inform physicians or patients about procedures or therapies. Document design, however, requires skills that are not normally applied, resulting in information that is often not used properly. This article describes a project developed by the Alberta Colorectal Cancer Screening Program. The goal was to help patients better prepare for their colonoscopies. The process started with an analysis of the existing documents, and the development of performance specifications based on the literature on legibility, reading comprehension, memorization and use of information, plain language, visual perception, page layout, and image use. The project included an iterative process of prototyping and testing that resulted in 23 design criteria. Each iteration was tested with users to ensure ease of use, completeness of information, and accuracy and clarity to facilitate adoption. The project helped reduce practice variation regarding bowel preparation in the province of Alberta, Canada. This project illustrates how information design can help healthcare organizations provide patient-centred care. Information design helps patients engage in their own caring process, by providing information that people can use, understand and apply. After 15 months of use, the document has been downloaded more than 48,000 times, suggesting a good physician reception.
Although corporate press releases are ‘preformulated’ to fit some of the conventions of journalistic reports, their style at times seems quite different from the one favoured by journalists. That is, there appear to exist stylistic conflicts between the press release genre and the press report genre. This study investigates the nature of these conflicts by means of a corpus analysis of the reworking strategies employed by journalists that actually use press releases to compose press reports. Roughly, two orientations can be discerned behind the journalistic transformations of release copy: Readability and neutrality. In order to improve readability, journalists create shorter and less complex sentences, use everyday words, replace numbers and symbols by words, and insert short bits of background information. In order to preserve neutrality, they remove company and product names, tone down or remove positive statements, and introduce the company as source for statements they do not want to be responsible for. Some transformations are more complex in that they are carried out in both directions: For instance, the company name may be removed as the subject in a press report sentence, but in other cases it may be introduced in the press report. These two-way operations are shown to be sensitive to different orientations at the same time. For instance, removing company names from the subject position may help preserve neutrality, while introducing it may personalize the text and hence improve readability. In the discussion, the genre conflict between press releases and press reports is analyzed in terms of the incompatibility of the stylistic constraints both genres need to satisfy. Some of the incompatibilities derive from differences in the communicative purposes characteristic of the two genres, while others probably have to do with the specific organizational context that co-determines the style of press releases.
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