 In this video, we're going to have a look at the third principle of readable documents, which is text guides. And why should you add additional guides to your text? Well, they improve comprehension, which is really important, and also the clarity of the document. And of course, as always, they make it easier to skim and scan. And there are a few things you can do to add additional guidance to the document. So the first thing you can do is make sure that you left-align your documents. You can then highlight key passages, add icons to sections, use flowcharts and mind maps, and use images for illustration. So the first thing, the easiest thing is to not justify or send to paragraphs. And the reason you want to have a left-align paragraph is because then the right-hand side of the paragraph is not even. And it makes it easier for people to navigate not to get lost as they go through the paragraph, which is particularly appreciated by many dyslexic readers. And also it will keep the spaces in between characters much more consistent. Whereas you can see with the justified paragraphs, they're often more difficult to keep the same. But the worst thing you can do is center an entire paragraph. Because as you can see, it's much more difficult to just be guided through the text as you go along. So that is a very simple thing that you can do without too much effort and make your documents easier to read. But you can go in one step further. And that is adding guidance as to which bits of the document are more important. And that's done through a very simple expedient by simply bolding keywords. You don't want to bold too many things, just maybe three or four words together. But as you compare these two paragraphs, you can quickly scan through this one or skim this one and get a sense of all the important things. Because so much in language that we have to write is just to connect things together. But actually, sometimes just the keywords are the important things that we need to read. So here you're also telling your readers what you want them to know, but also letting them at a glance see if they perhaps need to zoom in and get more information. Now, the next area for providing some guidance is to add some graphics into your text. And graphics are more inviting. They provide a visual division of the text. So it's, again, easier to navigate, easier to get around. And also, they improve recall because people have more things to hang their memories on. And you can do something very simple, such as using flowcharts to summarize the content. So here's, again, that same history page. And but if you add a nice little flow chart to it, well, maybe lots of the readers will not actually have to read that page anymore because they just get the key information from it. Or when they're reading it, they can always quickly refer back to it and summarize that key information and recall that later. Now, there are other things you can do. For example, you can illustrate some keywords from your document with images. So for example, here's a document that contains the word spires in it. And many non-native speakers do not know what spires mean. So they don't, instead of for them to have to look it up in a dictionary. Maybe you can put a picture of some spires with the label underneath it. Another thing you can do with pictures is to create a brief table of contents that or give people a sense of what's coming up in the document. So this is what I use in my guide to rapid move. Simply added some icons with the labels that just give you a structure, give you a sense of what's in the document, without taking up too much vertical space with a proper table of contents. And here, when you have a list of things to bring, again, it's much easier for people to navigate visually, but also to remember when you actually add icons to each section. So that's a very useful thing to do. And luckily now, Microsoft documents in Word and in PowerPoint can very easily do that by using the SmartArt feature. And Microsoft PowerPoint even has this great new feature called Design Ideas. And if you start with three words or a number of words and click on Design Ideas, you're going to get some suggestions. And some of them will include graphics. So if you want to get a list with graphics, it's very easy to do. And you can make it something like this. Now, you can also just simply add icons anywhere in the text. And they simply go to Insert in your Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint. And you choose icons and they're constantly adding new ones. And now there's a really good selection. So you have plenty to choose from. This is how I actually created one of the earlier slides you saw earlier. I simply made a list, then I click on Design Ideas. And I got a suggestion of icons and what I then did. I just modified the icons to fit my needs. There are other ways in which you can add icons even to documents that are not in Word, like this is from a plain canvas page. And you can use emojis for that. Because emojis are actually just font and they work everywhere. They're not exactly the same on every platform, but they will have the same idea everywhere. So as you can see, I can visually divide the page like this. And you can type emojis on Windows simply by holding down the window key and then typing semi-con or the full stop. There's also other ways to do it on a Mac or definitely on your phone. And then you can insert those emojis. You get a pop-up and you just type in the word that you think the emoji would be described by and then you insert that in. And there are many that can actually be quite useful and sort of universal guides that can be used in text. So definitely there are a lot of options. And as you can see, you can easily change their color and the size and so on. So these are some ways of providing additional guidance for your documents. In the next video, we're going to have a look at the information structure of your text.