Formatting the Great Wall of Text.

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This is a long comment regarding Joniki's post on bleeding eyeballs. He makes a great point, so I just want to add to it.

Too many authors just run everything all together into a hard to read block of text. The Wordpress editor (may it someday be improved) gives you all the tools you need to better format stuff and make it easy to read.

Use Sub-headings.

Sub-headings make it easy for people to skim a page and zero in on what they want. Use a sub-head at the top of every major section. The subs in the post are "Heading 3." You can use "Heading 2" for titles and "Heading 4" for sub-sub headings.

Put some white space inbetween your paragraphs. Different Wordpress themes will handle this differently. For example, light grey text on a dark grey background or zero space between paragraphs.

Use Bold and Italics Sparingly

Long lines all in bold may look ok, but are often annoying to read (depending on the theme.)

The same can be said for putting everything in italics, long long paragraphs, all in italics...

First words can often be in bold, certain words or phrases that need emphasis can be in bold or italic. Bold draws the eye straight to the text, Italic is more subtle. Let the rest of your text be the standard font.

Paragraphs should stick to one topic and I like to keep mine short, usually four or five lines tops. Remember, the goal is to make it easy on the reader. She should be able to easily skim and read your stuff. The longer and more complicated your paragraphs the harder that is to do.

Heh. I remember a college anthropology text. The author would start his paragraph on one page and finish it somewhere on the second. The entire paragraph would be one sentence and change topic several times in that one sentence. I never had any idea of what the text was trying to say as it was largely unreadable due to the formatting.

There was also his unwillingness to use short words when several large ones would better serve to muddy the picture.

Using Lists

Sometimes you will want to have a list of something, such as steps to do something. This is what bulleted and numbered lists are for. Lists make it easy for the reader to keep track of your points, like this:
  1. Step One
  2. Step Two
  3. Step Three
Or this:
  • Item one
  • Item two
  • Item three

Picking your Theme

As you probably know, Wordpress has hundreds of themes. Each one of them handles formatting differently. If you carefully examine the preview of each theme you will be able to see how it presents, or mangles, the formatting.

I usually make a private test page with some random text and various formatting elements. Then I find a theme I like, install it, then examine my preview page.

Take a look at how a newspaper or magazine formats things, that's a really good place to start.

Ok, enough on that. Here's to more readable text. :)

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Recent Comments

7

this is awesome i was able to learn some new things ..
how to use text in italic ,paragraph and picking up themes...
nice post..

Thanks. :)

I usually don't take the time to read big blocks of text.

I believe people browsing for information are usually impatient and looking to "skim" the text.

This is a great tutorial to remind me to keep my pages visually pleasing along with including relevant content.

There we go, I left extra space in my comment =)

Thanks. :)

Awesome stuff...these ideas along with "white space", I think you have yourself a beautiful piece of content. Add a relevant image or two and you have some serious reader engagement on your hand!

Thanks. Suggestions for images?

You have my permission to add my image to get notoriety seeings this blog is getting so many views. Great Blog Gmee

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