2.2: Considering Readability

What Is Readability?

All documents have a purpose—to persuade, to inform, to instruct, to entertain—but the first and foremost purpose of any document is to be read. Choosing effective document design enhances the readability of your document so that the target audience is more likely to get the message you want them to receive, and your document is more likely to achieve your intended purpose. Documents are also designed with usability in mind. That is, effectively designed documents are created from a user-experience perspective: if a reader can easily learn to use the document and find content, then you will have achieved a usable design.

Keep in mind that people do not read technical writing for pleasure; they read it because they have to, and it’s part of their job. And since “time is money,” the longer it takes to read the document, the higher the “cost.” Your job as the document author is to make their reading process as easy, clear, useful and efficient as possible by using all the tools at your disposal. For example, choose document design elements, like a 12-point, sans serif font or headings and subheadings, that make your document “user friendly” for your target audience.

Designing a document is like designing anything else: you must define your purpose (the goals and objectives you hope your document achieves), examine the constraints (such as word count and format) that you must abide by, understand your audience, and choose design features that will best achieve your purpose for target audience. You want to use the most effective communication strategies at your disposal; document design is one of those strategies.

What Are Document Design Conventions?

Depending on their purpose, documents differ in how they are designed and formatted. All genres of writing adhere to certain conventions in terms of content, the style of language used to express that content, and how the content is presented visually. For example, if you look at an online news article (or an article in an actual newspaper), you will often notice consistent formatting features such as large headlines, short paragraphs, images related to the article, and call-out boxes to highlight important content.

What Role Do Style Guides and Templates Play?

In many writing contexts, style guides and templates will be available. Style guides dictate the general rules and guidelines that should be followed; templates offer specific content and formatting requirements for specific kinds of documents. Academic publishers make style guides available to prospective authors so that they know how to properly write and format documents they submit for publication. Newspapers, academic journals, organizations, and businesses often have their own “in-house” style that must be followed by all writers within that organization. A company may have specific templates—or example, a memo template that all employees must follow—in order to ensure consistency of messaging. You likely had a style guide to help you format your written assignments for your introductory technology classes, and in science classes, you likely had a template to help you organize lab reports.

In ENGL 250, we use the APA-style guide to inform our choices.