Hyphenation
Hyphenation is putting a short dash between two words to join them. Hyphens are also used to split a word over two lines in order to make the lines similar in length. Hyphenation for doubled words (such as “plain-language writer”) makes sense and makes reading easier. Words split over two lines make reading much harder, particularly for people with limited literacy. If you really have to split a word in this way, make sure it doesn’t look silly. In this sentence the split is obviously not correct:

“The rope had been climbed by thrillseeking young girls.”

Can’t you see them just eeking away!

In many software programs, it is possible to turn off the hyphenation feature so that your words will never be in this unhappy situation.

Crowding the text
Keep the text from looking crowded. Some fonts have tall letters and the lines may look too close together. If you use such a font, you may want to set the document up with a little extra space between lines. The font you are reading right now, however, 11-point Palatino, is at the standard line spacing (called “leading” and pronounced “ledding”) of 120% of the point size. You can read more about fonts in the next chapter.

Too wide a space between lines makes it easy to lose concentration while reading. I seldom use double-spaced lines. This is double spacing. It takes up space and adds very little to the clarity of the words. Use it only when asked (for example, for schools) or if you want the reader to make notes between the lines.

How we read
If we have grown up in a Western country, we have been trained from early childhood to begin reading a page at the top left-hand corner and finish at the bottom right. It becomes habitual, so if we are designing an article for a magazine, we need to take that into account. Don’t try to be too fancy and stick your headline in the middle of the page, surrounded by the text. At least, not if the article is important. Many readers will start there and read on downwards. Colin Wheildon, an Australian who carried out testing on how comprehension was affected by fonts and layout, called this the “gravity factor.” People resist returning to the top to read, after looking at headlines further down.