Page 86 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

WhY MUST I REMEMBER ThE FOUR “F” WORDS? 75

Is the Document Readable?

Readability refers to how easily a message can be read and understood.
One of the easiest ways to enhance a document’s readability is to avoid
what we call the WALL OF WORDS effect. You are familiar with wall
of words documents; they are the documents that have long sentences,
long paragraphs, and use full justification. Look over your document and
make sure that you’ve made wise use of white space.
To illustrate the points about the first “F” word, let’s take a look at
a few examples. Figure 6.2 that follows is an executive summary that
Jason wrote on behalf of his department. The document summarizes a
report for the university’s Provost about a project concerning student class
attendance. Executive summaries are immensely important because the
executives who read them are busy. They may not have the time to read
the entire report. So they rely on the executive summary to highlight a
report’s essential elements. The main points of the report should be easy
to find and readily accessible to the reader.
The executive summary in Figure 6.2 could use a little help. It suffers
from the wall of words effect. The main points are in the summary, but
they certainly don’t leap off the page. By comparison, look at Figure 6.3.
The content is identical to Figure 6.2, but we made a few minor changes
to the executive summary’s formatting. Do you see how much more user-
friendly the revised document is for the reader?

Figure 6.2 Poorly formatted executive summary