I find myself writing quite a lot of articles, user manual-like documents, as well as posting hundreds of questions on stackexchange sites.
Over time, I developed a certain style of writing, which uses bold letters to emphasize keywords, and key questions. I do so, because I found that users often fail to see the key points that I'm trying to make. I find myself figuring out, what is the main question that I want to ask, and mark it in bold. Does using bold font improve readability of text for first time reader?
When I write a document that is about 10 pages long (nicely formatted with section titles, table of contents and such), I still find myself wanting to bold the key points. I'm interested in learning if using bold fonts improve readability of documents that may be read more than once, such as user manuals.
Maybe there are some professional copywriter or technical writer blogs, etc, that deal with this style of writing? I don't want to overdo it.
Answer
I don't have references to hand, and Google is failing me, but my (very fallible) recollection is that:
bold text inline decreases reading speed / legibility
bold text increases "scannability" when searching since folk can easily find the bolded text
There are, of course, other options to highlight key points that will help readers find the important text than bold.
For example bullet points;
- highlight key points
- help readers find important text
without the same typographic distractions. Sidebars and other marginal notations are also commonly used. I know at least one TA who says that the urge to use bold text to highlight is an indication that she needs to rewrite for clarity.
If you want to dig into technical writing more I recommend you take a look at the Society for Technical Communication (http://www.stc.org/). There's also an STC UX SIG with a mailing list that's open non-STC members (bias warning: I'm the list moderator ;-) You may find some folk on that list who have more knowledge about this specifically.
No comments:
Post a Comment