Make your copy easier to read

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by AppyPie as part of our Academy series.in this video i'm going to be talking about text decoration and text-decoration is a great way to make your copy easier to read and in many cases more interesting so there are many ways to make your text more interesting to read you can bold certain words italicize words put words in all caps or underline words and not only does this add emphasis to certain words and your copy but it also just makes it more approachable if your audience wants to read it and it makes it look more fun and engaging but it's really important that you keep in mind your audience so if you were selling something in a business to business market you might not want to use too much text decoration and that's because it might make you perceived as less professional but if you were sending an email to a friend or a casual audience then using some forms of text decoration is probably going to make your copy more interesting to read so I like to use these techniques and emails all the time another thing that's important to consider is you want to choose fonts that are easy to read and this actually goes back to a much earlier lecture in the headlines and it's the difference between being clear and being clever and in this case it's the difference between having a clear font that's easy to read or a decorative font that might look better but it's harder for our customer to read and when it comes down to those choices we always want to choose a font that's easy to read that's because we don't want to put any extra pressure or effort on our reader in order to read our coffee another thing you want to do is take advantage of spacing to make your text easier to read and by spacing I mean the whitespace that you can see in between this text so with these three bullet points I could have turned them into one paragraph but instead I've used white space here to separate them out and that makes it much easier for you to understand the message that I'm trying to communicate another thing that's really important is the text size should be consistent and that's for the body copy it doesn't matter if the headers a different size but in this example you can see that these three bullet points are all the same text size and if one of these bullet points was larger than the other two then it would be very confusing and it would really look unpleasant to your reader but by having them all be the same font size then it's much easier to read and the information is communicated more clearly but as you can see the headline is a larger size and that's perfectly fine another the thing you want to keep in mind is you want to avoid blocks of text so right here I have a huge chunk of text and it just looks intimidating it doesn't make I want to read it at all but if you compare that with more organized text then it's clear that I would much rather read this text in this format as opposed to this long chunk of text and that's because this chunk just looks like a lot of work it looks like it would take a lot of effort to read whereas these smaller paragraphs with subheadings above them look much more approachable and this also serves two purposes because it also helps us appeal to the two readership paths the quick readers that read the sub-headlines and the long readers that read all the text so now I want to talk about text alignment and there's three different types of alignment there's center alignment where there is an invisible line that goes through your text and your text is evenly distributed on both sides then there's left alignment where there's an invisible line to the left of your text and all your text is pushed up against it and there's right alignment there's an invisible line to the right and all your text is pushed up against that so Center alignment works really well for headers but it doesn't work well for your body copy and actually if you Center align your body copy it looks very disorganized and it's much harder for your reader to read so most of the time you want to align your text to the left and that's because of it makes it much easier to read and it's more pleasing to the eye and occasionally you might want to line your text to the right but it's very unlikely that you'll want to and the only time I could think that you would want to align your text to the right is for report covers you might want to put your name in the right and set it left so Center alignment works really well for headers but for the body copy, you almost always want to left align it and these two examples are both left-aligned so imagine there is an invisible line herein all the text as you can see is pushed up against that invisible line and same with this other chunk of text over here there's that invisible line that all the text is pushed up against and lastly, if you have a very casual audience you can have fun using some text symbols and these can be really fun to use but it's very important that you if you're communicating to a professional audience that you don't use these because they can be seen as silly see you can use these I was blown away or you can use periods to make a pyramid and build up to your the main point and of course, you always have the Smiley's that you can add in there.