It’s something of a paradox. But the space you leave blank in your documents matters. Compare these two forms discussed in an article about the importance of white space by the Nielsen Norman Group. (They help clients make users of their websites, applications, and products happier.) As the article says, The recreated Walgreens.com registration form (right) is…
Paragraph construction affects whether — and how fast — readers get a writer’s intended meaning. But getting the visual units (white space surrounding lines of text) to match the semantic units (what linguists call “episodes” made up of sentences) in a message isn’t that easy. Research shows readers aren’t good at dividing a document back into the…
I regularly advise writers to use grammatical parallelism and visual formatting to influence document quality. (Use the links if you don’t know what I mean.) But I saw some evidence presented by colleagues at a recent conference that led me to refine that advice. Here’s the bottom line for those who don’t want the details: Use…
Efficiency. One of the greatest challenges for amateur workplace writers, who have not yet wrapped their heads around the fact that their colleagues do not read like teachers do. I’ve made the point many times that teachers are obligated to read their students’ documents thoughtfully. And that workplace readers actually read the same way writers…
I don’t know people who read at work for fun. They read because they need help doing their jobs. That means they’re looking for documents they can USE. Few things make a document more usable than format. (I’m talking about white space, typography, etc.) Revising Professional Writing devotes a chapter to this topic. I’ve been using short…