Well, think about it this way. When you get dressed in the morning, don't you try to choose clothes that are appropriate for your job and for creating the kind of impression you want to create-- whether that's conservative, trendy, athletic, etc.? I'll bet you do. In the same way, you need to choose the "dressing" for your written documents that will create the right impression from the reader's first glance.
And there's another inportant reason for paying attention to the way things look. We rarely have a captive audience in the workplace. If your documents look boring and hard to read, they may get put aside until the busy reader has more time -- which may never happen!
With the widespread use of desktop computers, we are all more responsible these days for the visual design of everything we write. Fortunately, the tools we have available make it easy to produce good looking documents. All you need to do is take advantage of the formatting tools of your favorite word processor. The suggestions below will help you create effective and impressive documents.
White space
Remember what your textbooks looked like? Pages and pages of closely spaced text. Remember how they made you feel? Tired before you even started reading, I would bet. You don't want your readers to feel that way. You want your documents to look like they're going to be easy to read. One way to do that is to make sure there's plenty of white space. That's the space between the lines, between the headings and the lines, between the columns when that's appropriate, and around any graphics on the page. Some research indicates that a page with 50% white space is the most readable and inviting.
Headings
Headings and subheadings are important for two reasons: They help the reader find specific topics and pieces of information in the text, and they show the reader how you organized the text. Research shows that readers can remember texts with headings better and more accurately than text without headings. The headings act to create an outline with "slots" where the reader can file the information in the document in long term memory.
Line Length
Optimal line length for reading speed is 3 1/2 to 5 inches. That's why newspapers and magazines are written in columns. However, business reports are traditional done in one column across the full width of the page -- 6-6 1/2 inches, although that is changing. One option frequently used is to have a narrow column on the left whith headings and short summary sentences, with the body of the text on the right - something like the common 2-frame layout of many Web pages.
Go To Page: 1 2
