Principles

1. Understand context of use

2. Choose what to say

3. Slash everything else

4. Edit sentences

5. Put into logical order

6. Demolish walls of words

7. Choose links

8. Check consistency

9. Rest it then test it

2. Choose what to say

People read novels from beginning to end. That's reading for entertainment. At school, we were trying to absorb information to use it later, perhaps in an examination. That's "reading to learn".

Reading to get information ("reading to do") is different. People skim and scan. You can't change how they read, so edit to make it easy.

Apply headings

Headings are crucial for skimming readers. They also help you to identify the main points in the text.

If your text doesn't have headings, then construct them.

Make sure each heading is:

• specific, distinguishing this paragraph from others on the page
• explanatory, accurately conveying the key point in the paragraph

If you need more than 10 words for the heading, then split the paragraph into two or more smaller paragraphs. Apply a heading to every small paragraph.

At this point you may have too many paragraphs and too many headings. That's OK because you will be cutting out the unnecessary ones in the next step.

Remove bits that don't help

Set aside any paragraphs that don't fit the purpose of the page. You can always decide to make another page for them elsewhere.

Start with the best bit

(Also known as the inverted pyramid principle).

Choose the paragraph that is most useful to your users and put it at the top.

Then organise the rest so that the least useful one is at the bottom.

Make sure that the common circumstances come first. Let exceptional circumstances 'opt out' to be dealt with exceptionally.

Tip: concentrated reading

When someone skips and scans to something that really is compelling, they change approach and start to read in a concentrated way. That's when many people still prefer to print out the page to read from paper. So make sure that it works well on paper, too.

Tip: reading to learn to do

If you're reading to learn how to perform a task then you are 'reading to learn to do'.

Reading to learn

Thomas G Sticht (1975) "Reading for working : a functional literacy anthology" : Human Resources Research Organization, Alexandria, Va.

Well-designed headings

From Hartley, J. (1997): "In a series of experiments with secondary school children [we] investigated the role of different kinds of headings .... We concluded that headings significantly aided search, recall and retrieval."

Inverted pyramid principle

Pöttker, H. (2003) "News and its communicative quality: the inverted pyramid - when and why did it appear?" Journalism Studies, vol 4. no. 4