Keep your lines short

Sixty-five characters.

Two and a half alphabets.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm

Good typography helps a reader to understand the writer’s message and one of the principles of typography relates to line length. A line length of about 65 characters is optimal for reading.

Lines that are much longer than this are harder to read, involving more movement of the eyes and possibly the head, too. This is why magazines and newspapers are typeset in columns.

Unfortunately, the default template in Word gives a line length of about 90 characters.

There are different ways to manage line length in your documents. With the conventional document in portrait mode you can adjust the left and right margins as well as the point size of the font you’re using until you get two and half alphabets on a line. Margins of 30mm on left and right and 14-point Calibri Regular works. As does 13-point Arial and 14-point Times New Roman.

Alternatively you can use a smaller point size and put the text into columns.

Columns are really important when you are creating a document in landscape mode. Without columns, and wide margins, the lines will be far too long to be read comfortably. (You might consider this fact when creating slide presentations, but I will share a lot more about presentations in future posts.)