Use typography and layout for skimming
Bold fonts, short paragraphs, and borders help the reader quickly find needed information.
Last modified: 4/9/98
Help the reader find things quickly
People know to look in border areas for navigation. They know that short, bold paragraphs on the side may be of interest, perhaps as summaries. Their eyes stop on bold words intermixed with normal.
Decide which things the reader must find, and use these techniques to help them find those things.
Subheads help linear skimming
Using short, bold subheads every few paragraphs helps the reader who is skimming through prose find the sections that are of interest, or to just get the main concepts.
The subheads act as "mileposts" along the way as the reader reads or skims. If you don't put the subheads in when you first write (like an outline), it is worth adding them after you write the text. Sometimes adding them afterwards is actually better, since you can summarize what you actually wrote.
Short paragraphs help skimming
By having only one main thought in each paragraph the reader can use a glance at the first line to skim. For those that want to get more information, you can back up the ideas in the rest of the paragraph, giving more detail.
Use sidebars and call-outs
Sidebars with summaries on the same place on similar pages helps the reader know whether or not they want to read the rest of the page.
Redundancy is OK
Having the same information in multiple places on a page, presented in different ways, is OK. Different readers use different strategies for finding what they want, and the goal is to help them find what they want, not to produce the one "correct" way. Once a reader finds something in one place on a page, they often will continue to look there on other pages.
Don't overdo bold words
Use the bold words sparingly. Otherwise they get distracting and make reading hard. This is similar to many bright blue underlined links in the middle of lots of prose -- it makes reading harder.
See how hard it is to read this paragraph with all the bold words and other emphasis in it. Not only is the bold "crying wolf" (pretending that something is important when it really isn't) but the hard change from bold to normal slows down the eye when reading or speeds it up by attracting it forward to the next bold word skipping the almost as important middle text. Also, the bold detracts from the value of bold on the sub-headings within this page.