Training: Formatting

I just finished writing a nice, casual training for some general managers about formatting. It was fun, so I decided that I would share it with you too.


Whenever you’re writing a document and want portions to stand out, there are many formatting options available to you. However, we want to keep our documents and correspondence professional, so here are a few tips about how to format your writing.

Writing is easiest to decipher when it is clean and organized. Although you might have so much to say that you fill up an entire page with text, you should spice it up a bit—if not, your document will appear boring, overwhelming, and no one will want to read it.

Most readers don’t have the tolerance to read straight pages of text, so it is best to try and break up the information you are trying to portray to them. Your leaders are also very busy people, so help them quickly and clearly get in and get out of your message. Consider the following factors for page formatting:

• Font & Point Size
  
• Text Emphasis
  
• Alignment
  
• Color
  
• Page Headings
  
• Bullets & Lists

Font & Point Size
Despite the myriad of fonts available for our use, the preferred font and point size in all correspondence is Times New Roman point 12. Not only is this font highly available for general use, but it contains serifs to for easy readability.

Serifs are short lines that stem from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter, and serifs help us read text faster and easier than we do with a non-serif font (such as Arial).

Text Emphasis
Italics, underline, and bold are easy additions to format a page and provide emphasis for a document. However, they should be used sparingly and separately—never use more than one at the same time.

• Italics: use as an occasional addition to the sentence structure. Never italicize more text than a single word or small phrases.
  
• Underline: The use of the underline in professional writing is rare, as underlining actually represents italics, a practice that was used with typewriters. Do not underline text for book titles or other text in place of italics.
  
• Bold: best used for page headings as a way to separate blocks of text

Incorrectly or overusing emphasis devices can actually distract the reader and lessen the text emphasis.

Color
Using color to emphasize text is not professional and clutters the document. If color is necessary, it should be used sparingly, and only red and blue is allowed. Most documents can be created without the necessity of color.

Alignment
Leave text aligned to its default position on the left side of the page. When looking at a document, we naturally read text left to right, top to bottom. Centering any text—including headers—can throw off this natural reading pattern, visually clutter the page, and confuse your reader.

Page Headings
It is easier to read a document if sections and topics are broken up by heading. They also serve as reference locations to quickly help navigate the page. Headings are best formatted in bold.

Bullets & Lists
Bullets can be a good resource to make information stand out. Most commonly, bullets are used for a dense paragraph that contains a lot of information. Bullets can also be used for a list of information that needs to be viewed quickly, as in the list at the top of the page.

Did you know that most people can only remember the contents of a list containing an average of seven items? The maximum number is nine, so never list more than nine consecutive bullet points.

When making lists, the company's U.S. Style Guide recommends the following:

• End items in a list with periods if one or more of the items contains more than one sentence.
  
• If one or more of the items is a complete sentence, use of periods is optional. Just be consistent.
  
• If none of the items is a complete sentence, then use no periods.