My new textbooks have started to roll in and I am getting really excited about digging into the new semester! I flipped through the texts for my Effective Writing in Instructional Technology course. The books hit on all the "common sense" factors that often are lost in the excitement of jazzing up a Power Point presentation and loading up the page with the cutest cut and paste clip art. The citations for the books (and links to Amazon.com) are listed below. The Handbook brings the writer back to three main points – Make the content 1) Easy to Use, 2) Easy to Understand and 3) Easy to Find. Again, all common sense points, but not so easy to execute. In addition, I highly recommend the Presentation Zen blog in which Garr Reynold's covers "issues related to professional presentation design." He has a wonderful way of dissecting why some presentation techniques work and others don't. I also follow the Creating Passionate Users blog written by authors from Head First books, an O'Reilly series, who often cover topics related to how people process and respond to messages in writing and presentations. Cool stuff.
Kostelnick, C & Roberts, D.D. (1998). Designing visual language: Strategies for professional communicators. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN: 0-205-20022-2
Hargis, G.; Carey, M; Hernandez, A.; Hughes, P.; Longo, D.; Rouiller, S.; & Wilde, E. (2004). Developing quality technical information: A handbook for writers and editors. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-147749-8