These two papers discuss ways of improving the quality of educational texts used by the Open University in distance learning courses. The first discusses how text numbering systems should be used and when it is appropriate to use them; five recommendations are given. The last paper discusses how instructional design teams can best approach…

There are several reasons why the Open University (Great Britain) should define the teaching objectives of their text editors and designers--and how they can best be achieved--including the wide range of student abilities and the allocation of resources. A model of the functions of textbook design and editing would help provide a basis for an…

The three papers included in this report address typography for graphic communication, typographic access structures for educational texts, and typography as macropunctuation. The first paper considers the consequences of an aesthetic bias in the literature of typography, and identifies two misleading assumptions about textbooks; i.e., that print…

Given that comparative/contrastive arguments can be displayed separately in a text (one complete argument followed by another, or O-organization) or in an integrated way (with the various aspects interleaved, or A-organization), a study compared a third arrangement--a graphic format, or G-organization--that presented the two descriptions side by…