Presentation
Beyond your tone and style, presentation is about how you lay out your text.
Your aim here will be in quickly delivering what the reader wants, so you need to make the text easy to scan and ensure that the important points — or the key words which people will be looking for — stand out.
The way you present a formal document will be quite different from how you set down text for a website, so here we make a number of general observations that will be valid across different media.
Fonts
Fonts convey their own mood. It’s important to give some thought to which ones best suit what you have to say. Word’s default font has long been Times New Roman, with the consequence that it turns up far too often, and when it does, it tends to shout ‘No thought has been given to selection of font for this document’.
Fonts with serifs are easier to read quickly, but sans-serif fonts are more modern.
Text in mixed case is much faster to read than text in capitals, as the human eye seems most quickly to pick up what hangs below and juts up above the line of text.
Abbreviations and numbers can often appear overly dominant in a line of text. The way to avoid this is to drop the font size for these elements: ‘smallcap’ font variants can help here. The effect is most obvious in a block of text that continues over many lines, but can be illustrated in these two lines: one with and one without a change in font size:
- The report showed that the BBC had made £40M in overseas sales
- The report showed that the BBC had made £40M in overseas sales
The aim here (and it may have been defeated by how your browser shows the above two lines) is to make the characters of “BBC” about the same height as — but certainly not shorter than — the lower-case letters of “overseas”.
Resist the temptation to use many different fonts: the effect will be to overwhelm your reader.
Paragraphs
Traditionally, there are two ways of setting out a paragraph. Rather old-fashioned now, the first line of a paragraph in type-written text used to be indented by a small amount, perhaps the length of the word “The”. An alternative, now generally preferred, is to leave extra vertical space above the new paragraph’s first line. A lazy way of doing this is to press ‘enter’ twice at the end of the paragraph, but this tends to leave too much space. You will see throughout this website that we add just a little more space, but far less than a whole line. That way, it stops the paragraphs breaking up the page too much.
You can do this in Word by pressing ‘enter’ just once, but by specifying something like six points of space after the paragraph.
Bullets
Bullets can:
- Summarize
- Highlight the main points
- List a number of options
- Visually break up the page
but they can be over-done.
Try reading this word-for-word quote from George Orwell:
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions: what am I trying to say? what words will express it? what image or idiom will make it clearer? is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: could I put it more shortly? and have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
Now take a look at how the same words are set out on the ‘Tone and Style’ page on this site. This demonstrates the power of the bullet — but setting it down that way is by no means a criticism of Orwell, an exemplary journalist and wordsmith.