 In this video, we'll look at the first principle of readability, which is space. So why is space important? And you can think of that with this very simple metaphor. Reading is just like driving. So if you think about driving on a very narrow road, you know that you have to slow down because you have to pay much more attention to everything that is around you. But if you're driving down a motorway, you can go much faster because there is more space. And it's the same with reading. If everything is bunched up together, everything is close together, all of these things are competing for your attention. And you have to slow down and it is more tiring and it takes more effort and more time. So the number one thing you can do for your readers in formatting is make the font bigger. And I recommend at least 12 points for most fonts, but going to 13 or 14 can be even better. Remember that font sizes are relative, so you may have to experiment with the particular font you're using. But for Arial, I would often like to go to 13 points, that's quite a nice sweet spot. And you can do the same thing by adding a bit more line spacing. So the default really should be more than one. It should be at least 1.25, maybe going as far as 1.5. And there is good research for both this, the text size and the line spacing that shows that it really does help readers and increases reading speed. You can see the result here in a practical example from a recent redesign of the Say Business School website when we started with quite small fonts and very tightly bound lines, whereas now that we've gone to a larger font and more line spacing, you can immediately see it's much quicker to read, it's much easier to get at a glance what's going on. The other thing you should stop doing is distorting the text in any way. So one very popular way of distorting the text is making it all caps. And that makes it seem like it stands out more, but it makes it harder to read, and it's easy to overlook information in it. So it is much better to make the font bigger if you need to emphasize something or make it bold rather than using all caps. It is something that makes reading more difficult. The other thing you can do to distort the text for people is underline. And as you can see, when you add a line under the text, it starts interacting with the text. It may cross a letter, but it just adds more visual noise into the reader's way. And again, that's competing for their attention. Finally, it's probably a good idea to avoid italicizing large chunks of text. A word or two is probably fine, but if you italicize a paragraph, all of a sudden you made it more difficult to read. Because, as you can see, the letters are slanting slightly, they're getting reading into each other's vertical space. And they're also a different shape than people are used to. So again, that slows people down. Whereas, if you have a plain formatted text, that should present no natural impediments for people. The one more thing you can do is reduce the length of lines, because long lines require more effort in tracking. And if you can simply fit the lines into somebody's visual span, you're helping them read more quickly. And the advice is not to have lines longer than 80 characters, but it's probably better to go even for even shorter. And so if you can, make the text two columns, and then you will find that's much quicker for people to read it and also much less demanding. So here are the six do's and don'ts of space. Use a large font, increase your line spacing, use short lines, do not underline, do not use all caps, and do not use italics. And it's these very simple six principles will help you make your documents more readable. And in the next video, we're going to look at the next principle, which is chunks.