Abstract
Describing an action and co-ordinating representational and non-representational elements to express an idea are two of the most important tasks facing the designer of pictorial instructions. Previous attempts to describe a syntax for the organization of graphic materials are discussed. An experiment in which subjects drew their own pictorial instructions showed how people represent actions pictorially, the syntactic categories of elements with which they operate, and the variety ofsyntactic forms which can be used to express a pictorial instruction. Care must be taken, however, in generalizing conclusions from the production exercise to the design of easily comprehensible instructions.
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Szlichcinski, K.P. (1980). The syntax of pictorial instructions. In: Kolers, P.A., Wrolstad, M.E., Bouma, H. (eds) Processing of Visible Language. Nato Conference Series, vol 13. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-1068-6_8
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