Purpose, audience, context, and medium of delivery are the key components to consider in designing any document. For instance, if you are writing an essay for a college course, you can expect that your instructor and your classmates will read it carefully. Your design decisions should therefore make sustained reading as easy as possible; fonts that are too small to read easily or print that is too light to see clearly will make the reader’s job unnecessarily difficult. Additionally, instructors usually ask students to submit hard-copy work that is double-spaced with one-inch margins to give the reviewers room to write comments on the page.*

In most college courses, guidelines on design have traditionally followed a “less is more” rule — written assignments were generally expected to be printed on white, 8.5- by 11-inch paper, and the use of colors, extravagant fonts, sheerly decorative visuals, and the like, was in most cases discouraged. However, in many college classrooms, what constitutes an acceptable course “paper” or project is in transition; many instructors now allow or in some cases require the creation of multimodal projects — blogs, collages, timelines, videos, presentations with Prezi or PowerPoint slides, even playlists — in place of traditional papers.

Developments like these, driven largely by advances in technology, have obviously required some adjustments to traditional notions of acceptable design for college writing. “Less is more” still applies, however, in principle. Good design gives priority to clarity: Whatever the project, you should use design not for its own sake but to make your points as clearly, effectively, and efficiently as possible.

Of course, the same principle of clarity applies to most nonacademic documents you will write. In writing for nonacademic audiences, however, you cannot expect all readers to read your writing equally closely. Some readers may skim through your blog entries looking for interesting points; others might scan a report or memo for information important specifically to them. Design elements such as headings, bullets, and chunking will help these readers find the information of most interest to them.

Frequently, too, your document design decisions will be determined by the kind of document you are preparing. Business letters and e-mails, for example, traditionally follow specific formats. Because your readers will bring certain expectations to these kinds of documents, altering an established format can cause confusion and should therefore be considered carefully.

To analyze the context in which a composition will be “consumed,” ask yourself the following questions: