 Hello, welcome to this eight-part short video series on writing more readable and actionable documents. We'll focus both on formatting and language. My name is Dominic Lukas and I have worked for a number of years researching text structure, also working on a number of projects in the readability and dyslexia sectors. And I've also been a translator, a columnist, and a language teacher for many years. So why should you make more readable documents? Well, more readable documents are more accessible, and that's a good thing. But they're also much more approachable, and most importantly, they're more actionable, which means that the people reading them are actually able to take the sort of action you are hoping from them because that's why you're writing the document. Now, why may people struggle with reading your documents? Well, there are a number of reasons. They may have one of the difficulties, such as dyslexia. They may have reduced vision, difficulties with attention. But really, everybody has very similar issues to being dyslexic or to having low vision in situations where they are really busy or tired or new. And they can be new because they're speaking in a new language, it could be a new cultural environment, or just a new physical environment, or they're just studying a new subject. And you can get a feel for what it's like to be in that state just by trying to read this text really quickly without any preparation. And it will discover that you're struggling, you're more tired, you're feeling more irritable, and all it takes is to add a bit more space like this. And so what you're trying to do is to create documents that feel more like this and less like that. There's also some good evidence that well-formatted and simply and clearly written documents get higher response. So for example, this is from email marketing research. And before we go on, I wanted to really stress thinking about how people actually read so that we can format the document for the appropriate type of reading. So first, there's a comprehensive reading approach, and that is the thing that we think about when we think reading. That's when you read from start to finish as when you're reading a novel or a short story. And most texts are really formatted and written in a way that assumes that kind of reading, but that is actually not the way that people always read or maybe not even most of the time. And so another common strategy for reading is called skimming, and that's when you read for gist, to just get a sense of what that document is all about. And people use that strategy to get a sense of whether they need to go and continue and actually read the document more fully later. And the other approach is scanning, and that is when you read for specific information that is often done with documents that have information, instructions, and so on. And sometimes people also use it when they come back to a document they've already read, either skim read or read comprehensively. And we need to format our texts to support all three modes because we are doing our readers and ourselves at this service if we only focus on the comprehensive mode. Now to summarize the sorts of things that we can do to make documents more accessible and more readable and actionable for our readers, I am offering these five principles of readability. So the first one is space, chunks, guides, information structure, and simple language. And we will start in the next series of short videos talking about them, and the first one will be space. Thank you.