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Make Your Writing More Readable
Introduction
A few simple techniques can improve the communication and
presentation of written information. This article was written for
PDFs, but has many ideas applicable to blogs and webpages.
Make a Plan!
Plan what you want to say, and the order you want to say it in.
Some writers will attempt to write everything they know about a
subject, everything they know related to the subject, and also
everything they are currently interested in that is vaguely related to
the subject. Not only is this self-indulgent, but what points you may
be trying to communicate will get lost in the tidal-wave of text.
Drawing up a plan can help you “stay out of the weeds” and create a
more logical structure.
Start with a Text Editor
A word processor has lots of tricks and features and some of
these can prove to be traps and distractions! They freeze, go into long
save cycles and just do weird stuff. If you have ever sworn out loud at
a word processor program, you will know what I mean!
I strongly suggest that you write the majority of your text using a
good text editor, such as Notepad++. This has spell-check, word-
count and anything else you may need. Autosave functionality is easily
added with a free plug-in. Using a text editor will let you concentrate
on what you are actually writing, rather than how what you are
writing appears.
For blogs and webpages I type or paste html tags directly into the
text editor.
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Worry about fonts, layouts and appearance after you have the bulk
of a document written. Only then do you need to use your word
processor and start applying some of the ideas described later in this
document.
Length
When it comes to communication, more is not necessarily better.
As I noted earlier, some writers think that they should write
everything they know or feel about a given topic. On a good day I will
skim their article. Often attempting to read it is just too much time
and trouble.
Writing is ultimately about communication, so any practices that
make your writing harder to read or understand, or discourage a
reader from continuing, are counter-productive.
A native English speaker may read at around 200-300 words per
minute. Interestingly, we consume written information at a faster
word rate that we do by listening to it! Bear in mind, however, that
many of your readers may not have English as their first language,
and may read your words at a slower rate. What this means in practice
is that a work of around 2,000 words will take a reader between six
and ten minutes to finish. A reader may be reluctant to even start a
long mass of text. Effective use of headings or images to break your
document into more manageable, easily located “chunks”, can help
here.
There are no hard and fast rules, but a good guideline is to aim to
make a blog-post more than 300 words but under 2,000-2,500. Other
sources suggest a reading time of three to seven minutes. Webpages
and PDFs may be longer but should be broken into smaller sections.
Shorter articles also benefit from using headings.
Whenever possible, use headings and titles to break up your
document. Using headings can help you create a more logical
structure. Headings can also be used to create bookmarks and id-
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attributes that can let a reader jump straight to a section of interest. A
well-structured document will lead a reader rapidly to the information
that they think they want. Once that is found, they may be more
inclined to explore the rest.
Supposably, readers only pick-out the first three words of a head-
line and the last three words. Keep headings short and relevant, and
of no more than six words if practical. Summaries, such as
webpage meta descriptions, should aim for just one or two sen-
tences with a total length of around 25 words. Note the introduc-
tion of this article for an example. Google restricts meta descrip-
tions to only 160 characters.
Clarity
Using jargon and technical terms can be tempting. If you get it
wrong, it can be an “own goal” and make the knowledgeable reader
doubt anything that you have said. “Introduce” abbreviations and
technical terms the first time you use them in a document. For
example: “It was then flushed with PBS (phosphate-buffered saline)” This has
the advantage that if you have a wrong or different understanding of
a term your reader at least knows what you are trying to say.
Your reader may not have English as a first language, or may not
have the technical background that you assume. I am not telling you
to excessively “dumb down”, but bear the possible audience in mind,
and keep your English simple, defining jargon, slang and technical
terms.
Grammar is often used as a social shibboleth. Many grammar rules
you may have been taught are false and really prescriptivism. Some
actual rules of grammar are more about tradition and custom than
functionality. English, like so many things, is evolving, and some
grammar rules are now obsolete. “Good” grammar and punctuation
can increase clarity and ease of communication, which is the essence
of good writing.
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One of my friends protests that he does know grammar. Like my
friends who do too much research, he fails to grasp that it is the using
rather than the knowing that is important. Writing at a “sub-adult
level” will alienate many readers, or confuse others. Writing is about
communication, so you should not make your reader work too hard.
“Good” grammar rules contribute to clarity and reduce ambiguity.
Judge a rule by how it serves these aims. A “new rule” worth
considering is to try and avoid splitting phrasal verbs. It may be
prudent to hyphenate phrasal and certain types of prepositional verbs.
Using Different Fonts, Sizes and Layouts
Using Fonts
A very interesting, if somewhat long, source of information is this
document, “Painting with Print”, which refers to a number of studies
on the readability of certain styles of font. Readers of the Latin
alphabet use the upper half of a letter to identify it, so ALL CAPS is
slower to read than mixed or lower-case font, for example.
This essay is supposed to be about efficient communication, so I
will get right to the first point. The bulk of your text in your final
article should be in a serif font. The increase in reading clarity may be
small, but I think it has a better aesthetic effect. Personally, I like to
use Garamond, which has been claimed to offer savings on the use of
printer ink. I am all in favour of not wasting resources!
For headings and titles, use a sans serif font for contrast. This
document has three levels of heading, in differing styles. Also note
that all of the headings are in “title case”. Heading 1 uses Arial. This
particular title is centred but could be aligned to the left and possibly
indented, depending upon its length and appearance. Note the title is
less than six words. For a long title, or one using long words, I might
have used Arial Narrow., or some other sans serif font. Headings 2
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and 3 are both in Arial Narrow and left-aligned. The headings are
easily discerned since the letters are different sizes.
Font Size
Font size can be confusing! We do not want to waste paper. If
writing in electronic format we still do not want to make our
document unnecessarily long, which may deter a reader from reading
it. On the other hand, none of us are getting any younger and a larger
font can make a document more readable.
As a compromise, I have used 13-point (pt) size for the Garamond
text on these pages. Confusion occurs when we try to use different
fonts together. A 16 pt letter in one font may not be 25% larger than
a 12 pt letter in another. The reason for this is that the point size of a
letter refers to the size of its “character box” and has nothing to do
with the size of individual letters. Use a word processor to type a
letter such as “x” in different fonts, but the same nominal size in
points. The difference can be considerable!
If you want your headings to contrast nicely with your body text,
you will need to do a little experimenting. I use Arial and Arial
Narrow for Heading 1 and 2 because I know the letters in 16 pt size
appear about 60% higher than 13 pt Garamond. This gives them a
nice “Golden Ratio”-type relationship. For Heading 3 I use 13 pt
Arial/ Arial Narrow, which is taller than 13 pt Garamond and still
provides some contrast.
The quick way to determine relative sizes is to type a character in
your preferred body font and increase its size. For example, if you
intend to use a 12 or 13 pt body font, up the size to 20 pt. Next, type
the same character in your preferred title font beside it. Vary the pt
size until your title letter looks the same height as your enlarged body
font.
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Many of the principles in this document may be applied to
webpages and blogs. I use CSS to ensure the default font size is
“large” (18 pixel/1.125 em).
Headings and Titles
Many people that regularly use word processors have no idea of
the potential of the heading-style options. Using heading styles lets
you automatically generate a table of contents. If you are making an
epub document, the table of contents may be generated from what
you placed in headings style. If you are exporting your document as a
PDF the headings styles are used to generate your bookmarks for the
PDF.
The webpage equivalent of heading styles in a word processor is
the <hn></hn> tags, where “n” is the level number and a value
between 1 and 6. Use these tags for titles and sub-titles on your
webpages. You can add an “id attribute” (<hn id=name>) to a
heading tag, allowing you to hyperlink directly to a specific headed
section.
Page Layout, Columns and Margins
In the past, documents printed with mechanical printing presses
used wide margins. For modern printers, this is no longer the case.
Using smaller margins lets us put more information on a page while
saving paper and other resources. Theoretically we do not need a
margin or more than 0.5"/ 1.2 cm for most modern printers. For my
PDF documents I have taken to using a value of 1.8 cm for all
margins, although I may reduce this if I have a particularly large
footer or header.
Many documents that we create will never see a printer. For this
reason I have promoted the idea of creating more documents in
landscape rather than portrait format, making them easy to read on a
conventional computer monitor.
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One early drawback to this approach is that it gave a wide column Conclusion
of text that some people did not like. There is a school of thought
that a column of text should be approximately 70 characters wide. This article has been written using the techniques and suggestions
Some web formats favour 45-55 characters width. contained within.
As you can clearly see, I now use two columns to a page. Using
You May Also Like:
LibreOffice, a 13 pt Garamond font, 1.8 cm side margins and a 0.6
cm central spacer gives columns close to 70 characters in width. Word Easily Digestible Writing
365 gives the same effect with a 1.25 cm central spacer. Hopefully
Some Advice to Writers
you have found this document relatively easy to read.
Headers, Footers and Page Numbers Experience the Joy of Giving
If you have printed a document out, it will probably be loose
sheets until you reach the stapler. Suppose you drop it on the way?
For this reason, I like to add page numbers to my PDF documents. I
favour a “page x of y pages” format to give a clue that some pages
may not have printed out.
It is often easy to change or tinker with a document that is on-line.
For this reason. I often include a version number in the header or
footer, to notify an interested party of changes and that their stored
or printed version may be out of date. If you download or print a
document, you may one day want to know where you found it
originally. Thus, I often include the web URL in the header.
PDFs for Mobile Devices
I have little experience creating these, personally. Use a single
column and enable “reflow” if your PDF creator allows. Try 0.6 cm
margins all around. Body text of Garamond in 26 pt, with Arial
Narrow in 28 pt for larger headings, 26 pt for third level.

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