Introduction

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Designing Documents

The way a document is designed—the arrangement of text, visuals, and white space on a page—has a major impact on the readability of a document and may influence the reader’s attitude toward it. This chapter introduces basic components of document design, offers guidelines for designing effective documents, and discusses some common formats for documents you may be asked to create in your college courses or in the workplace. You may also want to look at the Think about Design sections in Chapters 2–10 to learn more about how to format and integrate visuals into college writing projects. In addition, Chapters 27 and 28 include research projects annotated to point out the formatting requirements in MLA and APA style.