Picturing information for money: visual usage in humanities-based grant applications

Incorporating visuals into technical documents functions as rhetorical and document design moves intended to: simplify dense text, draw attention to particular aspects, or convey emotion. Proposal writing literature, however, tends toward content and text-based analysis and production with little emphasis on visual communication. With this opportunity, this study investigates visual usage in nineteen successful National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) proposals to codify visual practices, describe current uses, and recognize opportunities to better integrate visual communication into this high-stakes genre. Results show that proposal writers in the humanities field seem to use text manipulations frequently and effectively, though there also seems to be little consistency concerning the actual form of typographical manipulations for specific purposes. Further, usage of graphical visuals appears to be an underrepresented aspect of proposal writing both in frequency of incorporating visuals and also diversity and complexity of visuals when they are incorporated in proposals.