PUBH 6333 Week 7 Peer Critique Example

Week 7 Discussion: Peer Critique of Draft Materials

What Survives the Screenshot? A Peer Critique Testing a Classmate's Boil-Water Graphic and Another's Smoke Alarm Text Reminder for What They Lose When Cropped and Forwarded, Then Turning the Test on the Author's Own Mower Tag

Reply to Grace

Grace, your boil-water graphic for the town water utility is clean and readable, and the blue droplet with the pot of water makes the action obvious at a glance. I want to try one test on it: what happens when someone crops it into a screenshot and forwards it to a family group chat, which is how many people will actually see it?

In your draft, the top band says "BOIL WATER NOTICE" and the bottom band, in smaller type, holds the affected streets and the date the notice began. A screenshot taken on a phone usually captures the middle of an image, the droplet and "Boil for 1 minute before drinking." Forwarded that way, the graphic loses the two facts a reader most needs: whether it applies to her street and whether it is still in effect. A relative across town could start boiling water she does not need to boil, and a week later someone could forward the same crop after the notice was lifted.

My suggestion is to put the area and the date inside the central image, close to the instruction, so that any crop that keeps the action also keeps its limits. One item in the CDC's clear communication scoring tool checks whether the main message sits at the top or front (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2019); for forwarded images, "front" might mean the center. Would your utility allow the street list to move up?

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, your text reminder from the fire department, "Free smoke alarm installation this Saturday! Reply YES to book," is short and has a clear action. Here the screenshot problem is different. If a resident forwards it to her elderly neighbor, the neighbor cannot reply YES from a forwarded image, and the message does not say who sent it or how else to book. Without the sender's name, it may also look like a scam.

You might add the department's name and a phone number in the first line: "Pruett Fire: free smoke alarms installed Sat. Call 555-0142 or reply YES." Federal plain language guidance urges writers to lead with what matters most and to spell out the action (Plain Language Action and Information Network, 2011). In a forwarded text, the most important information includes who is asking.

Turning the Test on My Own Tag

Fairness requires running the same test on my own work. The mower tag reads "No rides. Kids inside while you mow. Check behind you before reversing," with the county health department's logo at the bottom. If someone photographs the tag and posts it to a local community page, which a dealer suggested people might do, the crop would likely keep the three instructions and lose the logo. That turns out to be acceptable, because the instructions stand alone and do not depend on knowing who sent them. What the photo would lose is the reason: nothing on the tag says why rides matter. A reader seeing only the photo might take it as fussiness. I am going to test adding a short line inside the main text, "Kids who ride come running back," so that the reason travels with the rule. Targeted materials work by making a message relevant to a particular reader (Kreuter & Wray, 2003), and that reason is what makes the rule relevant to a grandfather who believes control equals safety.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019). The CDC clear communication index: A tool for developing and assessing CDC public communication products. https://www.cdc.gov/ccindex/

Kreuter, M. W., & Wray, R. J. (2003). Tailored and targeted health communication: Strategies for enhancing information relevance. American Journal of Health Behavior, 27(Suppl. 3), S227-S232. https://doi.org/10.5993/AJHB.27.1.s3.6

Plain Language Action and Information Network. (2011). Federal plain language guidelines. https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/