I'm talking about Kostelnick and Roberts chapter 4: Linear Components, people. How much of that chapter is actually news to anyone living in this digital age? Are their points not obvious? Of course your reader is going to get annoyed if put the whole message in uppercase, or you squash the letters all together, or the text is really small. I would say these things are given. Reading that chapter, I did not feel like an educated college student. 

In the preface of their book, they say "we envisioned students who are taking advanced courses in professional communication... the book will extend to visual design the writing and rhetorical principles they've applied in previous courses" (Kostelnick and Roberts, xxi). Wouldn't something as simple as what they call "linear components" have been covered in previous courses, then? This does not fit my idea of advanced. Kostelnick might very well be a nice guy, but if he ever lost ethos, this would be it: underestimating his proposed audience. They also claim that for this second edition of the textbook, to reduce the cost, they did "some tightening up of the remaining chapters" (xxiv). Personally, I could have used a lot more "tightening".

To summarize the chapter in a few sentences:

Linear components, such as typeface, size, bolding or italicizing affect the clarity, tone, emphasis that the reader perceives. You can do a lot of different things to text besides those already listed, including adding or removing space between the letters and words, changing the shape or how a block of text is organized. It is important to note that some typefaces are sans serif, some are monoline, and some are wider than others.

Put some images to describe the points, and there you go, folks.