Carpenter Document Consulting

For better or worse, the Internet has made everyone a writer. People communicate on social networking sites, try to be clever in 140 words or fewer, and blog. We’ve talked about writing for the web before, so today, we’re going to focus on formatting your blog.

Many formatting decisions depend on your blog’s theme. A business-related blog often looks much like the company’s website, like ours. A personal blog gives you more freedom to be creative, but it’s still important to apply consistent formatting to help your readers navigate through your posts.

Here are a few formatting tips for blogs:

Include a succinct title for each post

Just like a headline in a newspaper, the post title should draw your reader in and give them a sense of what your post is about.

Choose one emphasis style

If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, use italics, bold it, underline it or highlight it—your choice. But, don’t bold an important phrase in the first paragraph and italicize for emphasis in the second. And, certainly don’t bold, italicize, and underline one word. That’s a bit of emphasis overload.

Don’t overformat

Blogging platforms give you access to a variety of formatting tools—you can add color, pictures, fonts, and more. Stick to a few reliable formatting styles, and use them consistently. Too many colors, pictures and fonts will simply confuse your readers and ultimately detract from your content.

When developing a new document, it is important that you decide on the formatting styles you want to use. It is far easier to establish formatting at the beginning of a document than it is to back track and develop formatting after the content is in place.

Formatting helps guide readers through your document, so here are some ways you can structure your content to aid in reader comprehension:

Heading levels.

Headings are common in academic papers, especially theses and dissertations. Create one to five heading levels in your document. Using headings helps group related content and separate different content.

Bulleted lists.

Bulleted lists are an effective way to format like items. Bulleted lists attract the reader’s eye in a way a lengthy paragraph cannot. When using bulleted lists, make sure the items are in parallel structure.

Emphasized text.

Place emphasis on important words or phrases with basic formatting tools. Bold or italicized text focuses the reader’s eye on those words. Be sure to use one formatting style for emphasis. Do not alternate between bold and italics in your paper.

If you’re writing a thesis or dissertation and are confused by your school’s formatting guidelines, we can help! This month alone, we worked with more than a dozen graduate students at a number of schools on their theses and dissertations. In addition to a thorough comprehensive edit of your document, we can also make sure your document is properly formatted to meet your school’s guidelines. Specifically, we can help you with the following:

• Developing an automatically generated Table of Contents, List of Tables, and List of Figures
• Building heading levels to align with your style guide
• Adding captions to figures and tables
• Building PDF bookmarks
• Creating consistent headers and footers throughout the document
• Formatting appendices according to your school’s guidelines

If you’re too busy writing to worry about formatting, then contact us today!

Earlier this week, we talked about how editors help to make a document consistent. Similarly, we also ensure that your document is formatted properly according to your style guide. In an academic paper, this means checking heading levels, the table of contents, page numbering, and more. For marketing pieces or brochures, we ensure that formatting techniques like headings and bullets and used properly. No matter what type of document you develop, correct formatting and proper style are important.

Here are some formatting/style issues that editors can help with:

Table of Contents.

In Microsoft Word, students should assign formatting styles to their headings so that they can automatically generate a Table of Contents. For those unfamiliar with Word’s Styles and Formatting tools, this can be confusing. We can help develop the Table of Contents in any document.

Works Cited.

When you’re finished writing, the last thing you want to deal with is your works cited page. We can check your references to ensure they comply with your style guide.

Parenthetical citations.

Do you include the author’s last name in the parenthetical citation? Is there a comma between the last name and year of publication? How do you deal with an article by multiple authors? We check your parenthetical references against your style guide—and your Works Cited page to verify accuracy.

Graduate students writing their theses and dissertations often come to Carpenter Doc for help formatting their document. Each school – or department – has its own set of standards for these documents in addition to general standards set by the discipline’s style guide of choice. Luckily, Microsoft Word’s Styles and Formatting tool allows us to create standardized headings across documents and automatically generate a Table of Contents using these headings.

Save time formatting by creating heading styles with these tips:

1. Determine how many heading levels your document will use. Then, refer to your university’s standards and discipline’s style guide for heading standards.
2. With those heading guidelines in hand, create your heading styles by selecting Styles and Formatting… from the Format menu. Here, you can see all of the formats applied in your document and modify the style of Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.
3. Once you’ve created the heading styles, apply them by highlighting the text and choosing the heading from the Styles and Formatting drop-down menu on your toolbar.
4. With your heading styles in place, you can create a Table of Contents that displays as many heading levels as you’d like. Simply choose Insert – Reference – Index and Tables from the main toolbar, and select the Table of Contents tab. Modify the Table of Contents to meet your standards, and click OK to create it.

Heading levels can be tricky, so if you’re struggling with generating headings in your document, we can help! Contact us today!

Color can be an effective document-design tool, but many writers avoid using it simply because they don’t know how. Since there are no hard and fast rules for using color in a document, deciding when and how to use color can be a challenge.

However, color can be particularly effective in helping readers search for information. If you’re writing a complex technical manual or designing a Web site, colored headings can help guide readers through the text. When categorizing information using color, assign color codes in a meaningful manner, and limit the number of colors used by carefully selecting only those categories that should be distinguished.

Remember that the overuse of color can have an adverse effect on reader comprehension. William Horton explains that “the more colors that are used, the less the impact of each.”

So, don’t be afraid to use color. Instead, learn how to use it effectively.

How do I choose the right font for my document?

Font, or typeface, can be an important design tool in your document. It can establish relationships within the text by creating emphasis.

Consider these tips when selecting fonts.

• Avoid choosing typefaces that are too similar. This conflicting relationship within the text can be confusing for readers because the typefaces are not the same, but they are not markedly different, either.
• Instead, create a contrasting relationship by using distinctly different typefaces in your document. Strong contrast attracts readers and strengthens communication by creating a hierarchy of ideas.
• Contrast typefaces by considering size, weight, structure, form, direction, and color. Each of these features can help to distinguish one typeface from another, making your document more visually appealing and, more importantly, more effective.