Slack is no place to write the Great American Novel

The other day, someone asked me to read an important project update at work. I am a voracious online reader, and I was very interested in the project. But I kept putting it off. Every time I looked at it, a thousand words written in Slack chat, all in one paragraph, all in plain text, I felt overwhelmed. Not reading it in a timely way definitely made me worse at my job, but I just didn’t have the fortitude.

I kept marking the update as unread, setting reminder after reminder, and snoozing them whenever the notifications popped up. More than a week went by. Several days too late, I did read it. Because the information in the update was critical, I instantly regretted that I hadn’t done it sooner.

After that, I started paying attention to everything I was reading and writing online. It wasn’t just one project update from one person in one tool. Illegibility was everywhere.

As kids, we are taught how to write for legibility in elementary school. I remember Mrs. Horgan showing us finger-spacing and punctuation in second grade. We also learned how and when to start a new paragraph, when to use upper and lower case letters, and how to form our letters when writing cursive.

But when are we taught to write for legibility when we’re typing words on computers? For most of us, the answer is never. But with a few simple tips, there’s no reason that everyone can’t be great at this.

The medium matters.

You wouldn’t publish an entire document to see if someone can meet you for lunch in an hour; you’d send them a text. You wouldn’t try to get a code review by typing your code into a chat window; you’d use a code editor.

We type words in many different places over the course of a given day, and each place has a different purpose. One of the most fundamental mistakes people make when sharing written information is choosing the wrong medium to share it. Because each medium has built-in features or limitations that change how you’re able to represent what you’re writing.

Writing something long? Use a word processor or text editor that’s designed for long documents, one that has paragraph spacing and font and text formatting choices built in by default. Text and chat apps are only good for very short notes.
To a great extent, the medium is the message.

Use blank space thoughtfully.

Ever had a friend who talks a mile a minute, so that you‘ve barely processed one thing they’ve said before they’re on to the next one? That’s how it feels to your reader when you write really long paragraphs. There’s nowhere for their eyes to rest.

This is a case where what you learned in school—find a topic sentence and then write a lot of other sentences that support it—is probably undermining you when you write digitally. If you’re like most people, your paragraphs are about twice as long as they should be for digital readability.

Shorter paragraphs leave us some visual space to pause, helping us process what we’ve just read. Shorter paragraphs also make it easier to find our place again if we get interrupted while we’re reading. Which, let’s face it, is the norm when reading online; after all, that hilarious cat GIF you just texted me won’t watch itself!

On the other hand, when written paragraphs are too short, our minds tend to see the paragraphs as disconnected. This makes it harder for us to read for real understanding, causing even the most thoughtful prose to read like an avant-garde poem. In the most legible digital writing, paragraphs tend to have just two or three sentences.

Text formatting: Your best friend or your worst enemy

Years ago, I had an officemate who wrote everything in Comic Sans. Every time I looked at an email from him, it felt like I was reading a garage sale flyer. I definitely wasn’t buying what he was selling. Sorry not sorry, Comic Sans enthusiasts.

As my officemate demonstrated every time he typed, unconventional font choices are risky. And there is definitely such a thing as too much formatting. We’ve all seen websites that look like ransom notes with their random mix of fonts, text sizes, colors, and styles.

But used properly, text formatting can significantly improve reader comprehension. The exact same words become a lot more understandable when you organize and format them for legibility.

In using any text formatting feature, whether it’s font or style or color or size, you need both a baseline (how are the vast majority of words in the document formatted?) and a hierarchy (what does each formatting choice signify in your document?).

The baseline is easy to understand. The majority of the words in your doc are formatted the same way. Typically, you’re choosing a font that is easy to read, the text is often somewhere between dark gray and black, and it has no special styling applied — no fancy boldface or italics, for instance. It’s often 12pt size, give or take, depending on your medium.

Most writing software does its best to help you out with baseline text formatting. Unless you’re unusually design-minded, it’s often a good idea to stick with the software’s default. Some writing software doesn’t even let you change the default, because if you could, you might end up choosing Comic Sans.

But sometimes you need to highlight a piece of text so that it stands out from the baseline. If you don’t want your document to end up looking like an internet ransom note, proceed with caution. Every time you diverge from your baseline formatting, for people to be able to successfully parse your writing, the divergence has to mean something intentional.

That means that if you’re using 14pt bold for one section heading, then every similar section heading in the document has to use 14pt bold. If you’ve decided that all dates in your document should show up purple, then you can’t use purple to highlight someone’s name as well. Stay consistent so that your reader can follow along.

Obligatory reminder: All the formatting tips in the world won’t save you if your content is wrong.

Your formatting might be letter-perfect, but if you’re like most of us, your content itself may be working against you regardless of how it’s formatted. In particular, odds are pretty good that you’re writing more words than you need to.

Every time I write any substantial business communication, I write my first draft without too much self-consciousness about content or formatting. The important thing at that stage is just to get my thoughts down on paper.

Then I go through the draft again, playing a game I like to call “Can I Make This Half as Long?” Sometimes it makes me sad, relegating all those words to the trash bin. But if I can truly remove half the text from a long document, the final draft is always clearer.

Because the truth is, formatting tricks can only take you so far. At some point, the content itself has to be good too.