A part of crafting plain documents is to make sure that they are physically easy to read, so pay attention to the layout and format of your document.

For example, really long lines of text are hard to read – the eye wanders, it’s hard to keep focus. Readers easily lose their place and tire of reading.

Research has found around 50 to 70 characters per line works OK on paper, about 2/3 of that if you are delivering your document on screen.

One of the worst things you can do is to produce a document in landscape orientation with 11 or 12 point text all the way across the page.

Consider indenting or using columns to keep your line length manageable. That may also allow you to include some white space, or ‘air’ around your text.