Writing documents is rarely fun.

And then pity the poor person who has to read them. Even if you’ve done a great job, your reader will be busy, have competing priorities, and want to see your key points as quickly as possible. Sad to say, your document might not (won’t?) be their Number 1 Priority that day.

Since very few people love reading documents – and nobody likes reading them twice – readers need to glean your key points quickly. And, since you’re spending X hours creating it, you might as well spend Y minutes making it easy to read.

There have been many studies into what people find easiest to read. None of them are very surprising, but it’s always good to be reminded of these things:

As I say, this table contains few surprises. I guess the biggest surprise is that people often don’t do all of them.

Do you do all these well? To check, look at a couple of your recent documents. Could you make 1–2 simple improvements, to make things easier for the reader?