Vocabulary

Artifact: Something that is produced during a development process.

Contractions: Shortened forms of words or combinations of words, often marked by an apostrophe, such as can't for cannot or it's for it is.

Primer: A basic textbook or introductory guide that provides essential knowledge or instructions on a particular subject.

Font: The style or design of a set of characters (letters, numbers, and symbols) in a particular typeface, often used in printing or on screens.

Jargon: Specialized vocabulary or language used by a particular group, profession, or field that may be difficult for others to understand.

Influenza: A highly contagious viral infection that affects the respiratory system, causing symptoms such as fever, cough, and body aches; commonly known as the flu.

Lymphoma: A type of cancer that originates in the lymphatic system, which is a part of the body's immune system.

Psychedelic: Referring to experiences, art, or substances that evoke vivid, intense, and distorted perceptions, often associated with the use of psychedelic drugs.

Shoddy: Of poor quality or craftsmanship; something poorly made or executed.

Captioned: Having captions or written explanations accompanying visual content, such as images or videos, to provide context or enhance understanding.

Artifact Creation

Now that you have conducted a situation analysis, identified a target audience, created your objectives, developed your message, proposed channels to communicate your message, and described how to evaluate your communication efforts, it's time to get your message out to your target audience. 

Posters, flyers, social media posts, and tip sheets are all great ways to reach your target audience with your message. In this world of excess information, it's important to design your materials in a way that will catch the attention of your target audience and send a message in the way you intend it to be accepted. 

Tips to Write to Your Audience

(Your Guide to Clear Writing, n.d.)

Audiences respond well to logically organized, clearly written, and effectively designed information—regardless of their literacy level or ability to understand complex information. The fact is that doctorate-level scientists appreciate clear writing as much as someone who struggles with reading comprehension. Clear writing is for every audience and every material.

1. Write to Your Reader

   1. Keep asking yourself what your target audience needs to know (not what you want to say). 

   2. If you have multiple audiences, consider writing multiple materials. 

   3. Use you to connect with your reader. 

• Identify a specific audience and write directly to that audience. Good writers always keep their readers in mind. Follow these tips: 

1. Change Your Style

   1. Use contractions (write aren’t, not are not). 

   2. Use pronouns (like you and we). 

   3. Use simple words (write use, not utilize). 

   4. Be direct (write analyzed, not conducted an analysis).

• Public health writing is all about your audience. It’s not about demonstrating your linguistic mastery. Don’t write to impress your readers—write to reach them. Get right to the point and remove unnecessary content. And it’s okay to be conversational. Remember to do the following: 

1. Spell Out the Main Message

• An effective material has a clear main message. Don’t put the burden on your reader to figure it out—spell it out. Put that clear, succinct main message near the top of the material. Bold it and highlight it. Stay focused on it, and don’t include content that detracts from it. 

Check out these examples of clear main messages: 

Everyone six months of age and older needs to get a flu vaccine every season. 

The soil has high levels of lead. This can cause health problems, especially for children. ATSDR recommends blood lead testing for children under age six who have come in contact with lead.

4. Be Brief

We’re bombarded with thousands of messages a day, and this has changed the way we read. Readers tend to skim or scan materials now. Include just the essential information. Remember that the more you write, the less they’ll read.

5. Get Back to Basics

The easiest structure to understand in English is subject → verb → object. Don’t convolute writing with complicated grammatical patterns. Remember the following: 

• Write in an active voice. 

• Keep the subject and verb close together. 

• Use a strong clear verb (when a sentence is unclear, the culprit is often a missing or unclear verb). 

Check out these examples of clear structure: 

Passive: About 500 homes were left without water as a result of the chemical spill. 

Active: The chemical spill left about 500 homes without water. 

Weak: The training (subject), which was attended by 60 staff members and got over 95% approval ratings, was (weak verb) a huge success. 

Better: The training succeeded: 60 staff members attended and gave approval ratings of over 95%. 

6. Carefully Craft Your Title and Subtitle

The first thing your readers see is your title. It draws them in. And a subtitle can serve as a primer for what comes next. Carefully craft a title and subtitle using the following guidelines: 

• Title—no more than eight words to grab attention 

• Subtitle—no than one line to offer more context 

Check out this example of an effective title and subtitle: 

• Instead of National Safety Month,try this: Spread the Word About National Safety Month! (title)

Learn Five Ways You Can Make a Difference (subtitle)

7. Pay Attention to Design

Design elements can help readers understand and remember your messages. 

Remember to do the following: 

• Use images that reinforce your message. Never use an image that demonstrates something you don’t want readers to do. 

• Limit lists to no more than seven bullets, and stay away from sub-bulleted lists. 

• Use call-out boxes or bold for key messages, relevant related information, or content that helps spark interest. 

• Make sure there’s plenty of white space. 

Design and Layout Effectively

(Health Communication Playbook: Resources to Help You Create Effective Materials, 2018)

How to Create a Strong Layout

Use a Clear Visual Hierarchy

A clear visual hierarchy (the order of text and images) can help readers process information. 

• Create an obvious path for the eye—moving from left to right and top to bottom. Most readers start in the left corner, so put your most important information in that quadrant.

• Use distinct text size, color, and placement to help readers focus on main messages. Bigger text signals importance—so does the order on the page. 

• Emphasize different levels of information by making titles and headings bold or larger. Make the title biggest, then the sub-heading, and then the body text. 

• Group headings and related text together—leaving white space above each heading.

• (See the image on the right for an example of using clear visual hierarchy.(Your Guide to Clear Writing, n.d., p.8)

Access the appendix for a description of the image. 

Break Text Into Manageable Chunks

Instead of dense walls of text, use small, stand-alone chunks of text with lots of headings. This creates white space, which makes your material look uncluttered and easy to read. 

• Go for short simple sentences instead of long ones. 

• Incorporate bulleted lists to break up your content and add white space. 

• Use grids to keep content and images aligned.

How to Choose a Reader-friendly Font

• Use sans-serif typefaces (like Calibri). They may be easier to read than serif fonts (like Georgia). 

• Make sure the font size is readable. Use 16 pixels (px) or larger for the web and at least 12 point (pt) for the body of a print document. It’s better to go too big than too small. 

• Make sure lines of text aren’t too close together. 

• Limit the use of italics and all caps. Use boldface to highlight important text or emphasize the difference between headings.

How to Use Images Effectively

• Choose clear images that support the content and help readers understand important concepts. 

• Make sure images are relevant and placed in context.

• Use icons or images (like stars, arrows, and checkmarks) to highlight important content or group similar content.

• Make sure images with people show positive, healthy behaviors (such as people in a car wearing seatbelts or a medical professional touching a patient who is wearing latex gloves).

How to Enhance Content With Color

• Use appropriate contrast. Make sure images and text are easy to see against backgrounds.

• Choose friendly colors. Color choice can help complex topics seem more approachable.

How to Use Plain Language

(Your Guide to Clear Writing, n.d.)

• Make sentences shorter and easier to read. Sentences should be no longer than about 20 words long.

• Use active voice (not passive voice).

• Make sure language is simple, clear, and audience appropriate. Keep in mind that words that are appropriate for one audience may be completely inappropriate for another. 

• Remove unnecessary jargon. If you need to include jargon, define it in plain language. For example, instead of influenza, try a simpler term like the flu. Or if you need to include a technical term like vaccine preventable disease, also give a plain language definition like diseases that can be prevented with vaccines.

Posters and Flyers

(Chapter 6, Section 11. Creating Posters and Flyers, n.d.)

Posters and flyers can be a remarkably effective way of getting your message out to the public. Whether you want to generate support for a project, raise awareness about an event, or inform the public about a community issue, posters and flyers help you communicate with community members. This section discusses how you can make and use posters and flyers as part of your organization's communications plan. 

How to Create Your Poster or Flyer

1. Decide on your communication objective.

Take the time to define a communication objective first and foremost. 

Ask "What event or benefit are we promoting?" or "What attitudes or behaviors do we want to change or promote?" This is the essence of your message (such as "Smoking can cause cancer," or "Breastfeeding is good for your baby"). 

Examine what benefits the communication objective holds for your target audience. For example, for "Breastfeeding is good for your baby," some benefits would include breastfed babies are less likely to develop respiratory infections, childhood diabetes, and childhood lymphoma; they have fewer learning disabilities; they're 1/3 less likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS); and they have fewer ear and diarrheal infections.

Use these answers to come up with benefit statements—the reasons why your audience should want to do whatever it is you're trying to get them to do. Make sure that your benefit statements are accurate too; otherwise, you risk undercutting your message with false or misleading information.

2. Remember Your Target Audience.

This will help you decide how the entire message will be conveyed. Make sure your benefit statements are understandable to that audience. If a statement like "Breastfed babies are less likely to develop respiratory infections, childhood diabetes, and childhood lymphoma" is too complicated for your audience, try something like "Breastfed babies are less likely to get sick" instead. 

3. Develop Your Concept

• Sketch out some ideas. Don't get caught up in making it look perfect at this point; that comes much later. Just use lots of paper and let your imagination run wild.

• Look at what you have and play with other words. Puns, double meanings, and other types of word play often work well in poster campaigns. Try to think of ways that the visual elements of the poster or flyer could play with words as well.

• Let your mind make associations freely with the words, without criticizing yourself and without worrying about neatness. Get others involved with the brainstorming process. Keep in mind that whatever you come up with needs to be something that can fit well in the amount of space you have for your poster or flyer. For example, for a detailed explanation of the health benefits of breastfeeding, you might want to make up brochures instead.

4. Consider What Pictures or Other Graphics You Might Want to Use (if any).

Generally, it's more important for a poster to have a graphic than for a flyer, simply because it grabs your audience's attention.

Things to consider about images you might use:

• People often respond to pictures of people like themselves engaged in the activity you want to promote or encourage. If you’re going to use that kind of image, the people involved should be people the target audience can identify with. If you want to reach African-American youth, for instance, a picture of white middle-aged adults is probably not going to grab them.

• Bright colors leap out at viewers. One of the reasons the psychedelic posters of the sixties and seventies were so successful was their neon color scheme.

• In most cases, the image should fit the message. You may have a clever idea about using a picture of a flower to promote smoking cessation, but no one will understand your idea unless they stop and read your poster.  You usually have to make your message clear from the image because that’s what people will see when they first look at your poster, and if it’s not interesting, they won’t look any further. If, on the other hand, they see that image everywhere, even if they don’t stop to read the rest, it will begin to make an impression. Do you want them to think about flowers, or about trying to quit smoking?

5. Write Your Headline and Text

• The headline should be short, snappy, and connected somehow to the reader’s life. It should also affect the reader emotionally. 

• Make your case for the communication objective in the copy. Make compelling arguments and state strong facts. It’s better to have one or two very strong statements than to rattle off a long list and risk diluting the message.

• Decide on what type of lettering to use.

• Remember that if it is a poster, it will need to be easily readable from a distance—so big, clear lettering is best.

• Use a serif typeface for the body text. Sans serif fonts are very effective in headlines.

• One, or at most two, font choices is fine.

• If you have a lot of copy, break it up with smaller subheadings within. This keeps it from all blending together in the viewer’s eye and makes it easier to read.

A Few Basic Tips on Poster Design

• Simplicity is key—try not to have too many different elements vying for the reader’s or viewer's attention.

• Large, colorful images will grab your viewer's attention. Lots of contrast helps too.

• A novel image is another good way to catch your audience's eye.

• Your poster should be easy to read from a distance. Colors that can be easily read from a distance include white on red, black on yellow, dark blue on white, green on white, and the ever-popular black on white.

• Colors can have different effects: greens, blues, and purples tend to be soothing and calming; red, orange, and yellow tend to excite and attract attention.

Mistakes to Avoid

• Visual clutter—it's okay to have a lot of different elements on it, but not so many that it looks junky or chaotic. Be sure that you can look at it from a distance and get at least a general idea of what it's about.

• Unclear or easily misunderstood wording or images—again, you want the audience to at least get the general idea on a first glance. If they have to think too hard about it, they may not take a second look.

• Typos or spelling errors—as with any of your printed materials, you should strive for accuracy and professionalism.

• Bad art, photography, or production values—if your poster looks cheap or shoddy, it's bad for your group's public image. Don't do posters if you can't afford to do them right!

(Health Communication Playbook: Resources to Help You Create Effective Materials, 2018, p. 30)

Tip Sheets

(Your Guide to Clear Writing, n.d.)

Offering tips (such as “Five Ways to Stay at a Healthy Weight”) is a great way to reach your readers. This model is easy to read and encourages readers to engage with the content. Limit your material to 10 tips or fewer (fewer is better).

Structure of the Tip Sheet

• Title and Subtitle: Write a short title (no more than eight words) to grab your readers’ attention. You can also choose to include a subtitle (no longer than one line) to offer more context. 

• Anecdote or Scenario: Consider telling a very short story to show the need for these tips. 

• Transition: Transition into the tips with a sentence like, “Here are three ways to…” 

• Tips: State each tip clearly and succinctly (1–2 short sentences each). Bold the tips—and consider numbering them. You may also want to use a different color font or color blocking to emphasize the tips. Follow each tip with a brief explanation. 

• Wrap-Up: Restate the need for the tips with a sentence like, “Use these tips to…”.

(Your Guide to Clear Writing, n.d., p.15)

References

Chapter 6, Section 11. Creating Posters and Flyers. (n.d.). Community Tool Box. https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/participation/promoting-interest/posters-flyers/main

Health Communication Playbook: Resources to Help You Create Effective Materials. (2018). U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/clearwriting/docs/health-comm-playbook-508.pdf

Health Communications in Tobacco Prevention and Control. (2018). U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/stateandcommunity/guides/pdfs/health-communications-508.pdf

Your Guide to Clear Writing. (n.d.). https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/clearwriting/docs/clear-writing-guide-508.pdf