This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Layout – the way we set out and organise a document on screen or on paper
Number one thing, the most important thing, is to lay it out so that it makes it easy to read, so physically easy to read.
The next thing is to see if we can layout our document so that it looks good. It’s much nicer to read a document or to interact with a document that’s pleasant to look at.
And the third thing we want to do is to use layout to show the structure of a document. And so we need to distinguish between different types of information, and link together similar types of information.
Now, look, I’m not a design expert, but let me show you a few ideas I’ve used in the course booklet that you have.
Firstly, I’m never going to write using all caps. The reason for that is because the way we recognise words is we look at the shape of the word rather than the letters in the word. That’s true if we’re been reading for a while. So if I write the word cats and dogs all in caps, they both look like an identical block of text, and it’s hard to distinguish the word. Whereas if I write using upper and lower case, the bits that go up and the bits that go down help me recognise the shape of the word. So I’m never going to write using all caps.
Sometimes you can get away with all caps in a heading or just a single word. But certainly never write an entire paragraph in all caps.
Now, sadly often that is done for really critical and important safety information. I think the people who produce this say, hey, this is really important, serious stuff. I’m going to shout at you by using all caps. Well, it’s good to highlight that information, but it does make it much harder to read if it’s in all caps. So that’s not a very helpful way of providing that sort of critical safety information or any other information that’s vitally important. Other ways of setting it out might be better to highlight it using bold or indenting or some other way, but not writing it in all caps. It makes it hard to read.
Next thing I’ve done is I’ve just used a fairly simple clean font, nothing fancy in the document. You do have a choice between serif and sans serif. Serif is where we’ve got the little feet along the bottom of the letters. I often use that for the body text. And the reason for that is because it helps my eye go along the line. I can follow the line more easily because I’ve got the little feet there. I might use sans serif for the headings because I’m reading a short amount, I don’t need that assistance anymore. So make a choice between serif and sans.
Most of the time, particularly for printing, it will be around about 11 to 13 point in terms of size. And I like to use a little bit of spacing between each line. In fact have used in this document 1.2 line spacing. And again, that’s just about making it physically easy for people to read. I can identify the line a little bit better, and these lines aren’t bunching up against each other.
You can use italic and bold to emphasise words – that can be a useful tool. You can also use colour to highlight and to emphasise different parts of text. Now I haven’t done that in the book because I’m not artistically competent. I think you need to have some understanding of colour to be able to do that well. So you might want to talk to your graphic design people about that. But if you do choose to use colour, please make sure there is high contrast between the text and its background. Be very careful about putting text on top of photos or other material. And please don’t do that really arty thing where we’ve got light grey on dark grey. It might look great, but it is really hard to read, especially for people of my vintage. We need high contrast.
You’ll use different styles for different headings, but you’ll use the same style for every level of heading. So that means all your heading 1s should look the same, but all your heading 1s should look different to all your heading 2s and 3 so that I can see from the style you are using in the heading the structure of the document.
Now, if you’re printing your document on paper, sometimes the A4 page is just a little bit too wide. So you might want to indent your text a little bit to shorten the line length. And certainly never put an A4 page in landscape mode and expect people to read right across the page. That is, the line is just far too long for people to read with any comfort.
It’s also good if you can include some white space on the page. That just provides a bit of air if you have a bit of space for people.
And normally you want to have your text left justified. That’s a straight edge on the left and a ragged edge on the right. That again is just about helping people to find that next line, make it a little bit easier for them to physically read the document.
Now, often if you’re working inside an organisation, many of these design decisions have been made for you by a graphic designer and you have a template to work in. That can be really helpful. That allows you to focus on the content and just use the things that are inside that template. Use them as tools to highlight text, and to show structure to make it easier for your reader.
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