HIGHLIGHTING – Making your Writing more attractive to the reader, and easier to understand.

(this can be used for your visuals, too, in an oral presentation.)

You can help your reader and yourself by using a few simple page layout strategies and tactics in your writing (and in your visuals for oral presentations). 

How many times have you wondered how to clearly communicate so much information, so many regulations, the details of a new policy, or the reasons why your idea was best?

Look at the suggestions below for some help.  There may be others that you like to use, but when writing memos and reports, ALWAYS keep to one font (text style) if possible.

When you want information to stand out clearly in a list, use Bullets

  idea one

  idea two

  idea three

Sometimes you can center the information from the rest of the paragraph

                                                          item one

                                                          item two

                                                          item three

but, you may not want to make a list.  So, you can number the ideas within your paragraph like this:  Here are (1) idea, (2) idea, and (3) idea.

Other times, you can use bold to emphasize a word or italics to show something important or special.  Even CAPTIAL letters help, too.  And you can underline words.  Or, in e-mail or websites, you can use color.

Occasionally, it is necessary to separate information apart from the text, so you can use a box

When you have lots of information that you need to group together into sections, it is effective to use HEADINGS (look at the short report format for these [SUMMARY  BACKGROUND,etc.])

Sometimes, too, if you want to be clever, you can combine these tactics.  But be careful not to overuse these or your writing will become less effective – like putting an exclamation mark (!) after even sentence.  The highlighting will lose its power.