New Year’s resolution day two: suggestions for making your documents better

Last week I suggested a New Year’s resolution for technology architects: to improve how we present and format documents. I suggested this not just because I am pernickety about document formatting (I am), but because good formatting makes our ideas easier to understand, helps those ideas compete on a level playing field with others, and express our identity as professionals who care.

On the dangerous assumptions that that, first, you were persuaded by this blog post, and, second, that you are interested in keeping this resolution beyond 2nd January, here are a few further suggestions from me on how to put it into practice. As ever, these suggestions come with the caveats that they work for me, but may not work for you, and that I am frequently wrong.

First Decision: Upright or Sideways?

One of the first decisions we must make when writing a document is which application we open to write it. Do we open our presentation application (Powerpoint, Slides or Keynote) or do we open our word processing application (Word, Docs or Pages)? Do we click on the P or the W?

This is more than just a choice of tool, or whether the final product will be wider than it is tall or taller than it is wide: it is a choice about whether the document will follow a presentation style (graphics heavy, in which each slide should be constructed to deliver a key message or piece of information) or a document style (word heavy, in which you can build an argument with supporting evidence over several pages). Although many people have strong views about which is better, either can work, as long as you make a conscious choice, and pick the style which best suits your purpose.

Second Decision: Reading or Listening?

The second decision you should make is how you expect your audience to receive the document. Will they be sitting in a meeting or a presentation, listening to you (or someone else) talk? Or will they be reading the document on their own? If they are reading the document on their own, will they be reading it as reference material to support a practical decision they are making, or will they be skimming it on their way into a meeting which is going to make a collective decision?

You can’t always predict exactly how your document will be consumed, but it is worth trying to anticipate the life of your document after its immediate production. My experience is that a good document which shapes important choices will have a longer life than you expect, and will, over that life, be consumed more often by readers than by listeners. My view, therefore, is that you should always try to make your document friendly to readers: to make it possible to understand even when you are not in the room.

Avoid Basic Mistakes

Now that you’ve figured out whether your document is sideways or upright, and whether you expect it to be received by readers or listeners, you can actually write the thing. I can’t help you with the content: you’re the expert (although you might find some of these rough and ready rules for writing helpful).

What I can suggest, though, is that you look out for some of these common formatting mistakes. These may seem incredibly basic, but I see documents which make these mistakes almost every day - and I still catch myself making some of these mistakes.

Mixing fonts: modern applications give us dozens, if not hundreds of fonts to play with, and it is tempting to make use of them. Resist this temptation: it’s best to stick to one of the boring fonts which most companies use. The advantage of a boring font is that nobody notices it: by contrast, novel fonts distract the reader, and multiple fonts in the same document distract the reader multiple times.

Mixing sizes: modern applications also give us many choices about the size of font to use. Again, resist the temptation to play with this: pick a standard, legible font size and stick to it. It’s fine to vary this for headings, but the body of your text should all be the same. When you’ve finished writing your document, go back and check that you haven’t accidentally mixed sizes: a single point difference can sometimes be difficult to spot, but gives a weird feeling to the reader.

Inconsistent spacing: one of the differences between novels and business documents written in a business context is that we typically put spaces between paragraphs in business documents. This is because we are not typically seeking the immersive flow of a novel: we are seeking to make well framed, bounded statements in each paragraph, to let the reader absorb or challenge, and then move on. This step by step understanding can be broken if the reader suddenly encounters unexplained chunks of white space, or finds long, complex paragraphs running together without a break.

As a suggested rule of thumb, I never use blank lines to space paragraphs, but always use the paragraph spacing feature of the relevant application: I find that a half font size (for example, six point if you’re using twelve point text) break gives the right amount of mental breathing space.

Wonky alignment: although literate humans will immediately see legible text as language, they will also see blocks of text as shapes (and for diagrams, they will see shapes as shapes). This means that, when these shapes are out of alignment, they look strange, wrong and distracting. When you lay out your document, it’s worth checking whether your bullets, indents and so on all line up. As with font sizes, this can occasionally be difficult to spot, but you can bet that your readers will notice it.

Step Back

One of the best pieces of advice I received when studying my very first course with the Open University was to finish every assignment early (that’s good advice anyway), and put it in a drawer for at least a couple of days without looking at it - then pull it out of the drawer and read it again.

It is remarkable how different a document looks and feels when you are not in the middle of writing it, and when you have created a little distance. You suddenly see wonky lines, odd formatting and other basic mistakes that you were too close to see previously: you suddenly realise how your formatting is getting in the way of your ideas. (This works for content as well as formatting: sentences which seemed completely clear when you were writing them suddenly seem obscure and difficult to understand, while concepts which you thought you had oversimplified suddenly seem clear.)

Ask a Friend

However, even if you try to make your own eyes fresh by giving yourself a little space and time, there is no substitute for getting someone completely new to read the document. When you do this, it is important to make sure that you give that person permission to be perfectly critical: to tell you all the things that bother them about the document, no matter how trivial. Often, fellow architects will be shy to tell you about formatting problems, as they will regard such problems as superficial and unimportant. But you should ask them to tell you everything that gets in the way of understanding. And then you should fix it.

Finally, the important thing to remember is that you are not pursuing good formatting because you want the look of your document to stand out: rather, you are pursuing good formatting becuase you want the formatting to fade into the backgroud. You want nothing to snag the eye and brain of your reader other than your ideas.

It takes practice, effort and persistence to build these habits - but that is true of most New Year’s resolutions if they to make a lasting difference to your life.