Good document design promotes readability and increases the chances that you will achieve your purpose for writing and reach your readers. How you design a document—in other words, how you format it for the printed page or for a computer screen—affects your readers’ response to it. Most readers have certain expectations about how documents should be designed and formatted, usually depending on the context and the purpose of the piece of writing. This gallery features pages from both academic and business documents. The annotations on the sides of the pages point out design choices as well as important features of the writing.

Standard academic formatting

Use the manuscript format that is recommended for your academic discipline. In most English and some other humanities classes, you will be asked to use MLA (Modern Language Association) format (see MLA-5). In most social science classes, such as psychology and sociology, and in most business, education, and health-related classes, you’ll be asked to use APA (American Psychological Association) format (see APA-5).

The samples on the next five pages show basic formatting in MLA and APA styles. For complete student papers in MLA and APA formats, see A4-h, MLA-5b, and APA-5b.

Standard professional formatting

The samples at the end of this section are good examples when you are preparing to write a professional document such as a letter, a memo, or a résumé. In general, the writing done in business and professional situations is direct, clear, and courteous—and documents are designed to be scanned easily and quickly. When writing less formal documents such as e-mail messages in academic contexts, it’s just as important to craft the document for easy readability.