Tag Archives: formatting

Use white space to ‘chunk’ your content

Document structure, writing tip,

Make the structure of your document visually obvious so that readers find it easier to identify the different chunks of information.

So, when setting the spacing around your headings, create distance from the previous topic with some white space. Keep the heading closer to the content it introduces, but with enough distance to set it apart as a heading – it looks different to the text that follows.

You can control that by using the spacing settings before and after each paragraph.

White space – areas in a document that are blank – is a helpful structural design tool, but it also gives your reader some amount of visual relief. None of us like to be confronted with a wall of end to end text.

Use styles to control the look of a document

Document structure, writing tip

Use your word processor to define styles for different categories or types of text of text.

Set up a style with the font type, font size, indent space, space before/after and line spacing for each heading or text category you use. Then you won’t need to change the formatting in each individual paragraph and your text will be consistently presented throughout the document.

That helps both you and your readers.

All text of the same type will  look the same – all heading 1s will look the same, all headings at level 2 will look the same and so on. And your heading 1s will look different to your heading 2s and different to your main text.

The basic structure of your text will be displayed visually – seen at first glance.

Don’t use all caps

Document structure, writing tip

USING ALL UPPER CASE MAKES YOUR TEXT HARD TO READ. VISUALLY IT LOOKS AS THOUGH YOU ARE YELLING AT ME, AND IT’S MUCH HARDER TO READ.

Competent readers read more by identify the shapes of words rather than processing all the individual letters in the word. The ups and downs of lower case text form familiar shapes that we readily identify as words. 

Text in all upper case makes every word look like a similar block, and so readers are forced to slow down to decode the individual letters. Sentence case (upper and lower case) is much easier to read.

Novice writers sometimes write important messages in upper case, thinking they will be noticed. Setting out important messages in a way that makes them difficult to read makes no sense, and is perhaps irresponsible.