If your correspondence is hard to read, people will skip it or miss important details. Document design can make the difference between a message that someone just glances at and one that gets read. These resources demonstrate how to use document design to make your letters and memos polished, professional, and easy to read.
Apply These Strategies to Your Project
- Use standard margins (generally 1") on all sides of your document. Keep your paper to letter size (8.5" by 11").
- Choose a font size that is large enough to read without magnification.
- Avoid fonts in all caps, since they decrease readability. See the LinkedIn Learning video “Avoid All Caps and Underlined Text” for more information.
- Arrange your text so that uses flush left, ragged right alignment. See the #FridayFact: Centered Text Is Harder to Read and the #ThursdayThought: F-Shaped Reading Pattern.
- Use the design principles of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (CRAP) to improve your document design. See the #ThursdayThought: Put CRAP in Your Document Design.
- Structure your document so the information is well-organized and easy to navigate. See the #WeekendWatch: Chunking Your Paragraphs into Readable Bites and the #FridayFact: Information-Rich Signposts Help Readers.
Photo credit: va-memo-2 by MedillNSZ on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.