Formatting plays a vital role in keeping a consistent appearance as well as making a chunk of words easier to read and understand.

It makes life so much easier when there is a guide to how our communication is formatted, rather than have to think how to do it each time.

Headings and subheadings

Separating different sections helps the reader to get an overall view while skimming, and to not be overwhelmed by a large piece of information, but don’t add too many in a row with only a bit of text between.

Links

These help accessibility and screen readers and should be incorporated into the text. Where possible, don’t use ‘click here’ or ‘refer to this document’, and instead incorporate the link name into the sentence.

Underline or italicise

Don’t. Especially not headings. It does NOT make them stand out more, and can actually make text harder to read.

Bullet points

Breaking up large blocks of text makes it easier to read and helps highlight specific items in a list for the user.

When using bulleted lists, follow these rules:

  • Use bulleted (unordered) lists or steps instead of large blocks of text.
  • Use parallel structure. This means each bullet should start with the same type of word (noun, verb) in the same tense and form, as with these bullets.
  • Use a colon at the end of the text to introduce the bulleted list.
  • Capitalise the first word of a bullet only if the bullet is a complete sentence or doesn’t have introductory text.
  • Use a full stop at the end of items in the bullet list that are complete sentences.
  • Keep the bulleted items of similar length and sentence style. If one bullet is a complete sentence, all of the rest should be as well.