When Kath Straub gave her presentation on Reading beyond the words: How text formatting can enhance the readability and persuasiveness of text at the Technical Communications UK 2009 (TCUK09) Conference she created an unexpected storm. That’s probably because what Kath was saying about a very specific meaning of “text formatting” seemed to be contradicting the current dominant trends in the technical publications field. But I for one was very glad to have heard her presentation as I think I learned a great deal from it.

Once upon a time, the technical publication process used to involve a wide range of specialists. Authors would write, typists would type up manuscripts, editors would review and correct, illustrators would create the graphics. The layout of a book, including the layout of individual pages, the choice of display and body fonts, the sizes of the margins, and the positioning of the graphics and tables, was the domain of the specialist typographer.Typesetters set the type, pulled galleys, sent them to the proofreaders, and then printers (people who were printers, that is) would print the book, which would then be folded, stitched, and bound and sent to a bookshop. I hope that what is clear from this description is that the author was only responsible for the words, and not for the way in which they were presented. There was a distinction between responsibility for content, and responsibility for form.

Digital technology has changed the publishing process beyond recognition. In particular, the advent of desktop publishing software on PCs meant that technical writers became responsible not only for authoring the technical content but also for designing book and page layouts, and for book production, tasks previously undertaken by other specialists.
The latest trends in technical publishing have actually moved us back to a point where responsibility for form and presentation are taken away from the person creating the content: trends such as single-sourcing and structured authoring to XML-based standards mean that technical writers can write content once and publish it to many formats. This can lead to huge cost savings for technology companies. Modular approaches to document creation mean that snippets of text can be re-purposed, leading to more savings and more efficiencies of scale, especially when translation costs are taken into account. Writers write, and XSLT or XML-FO experts create the programmatic transformations that output the content as manuals for PDF or print, as help files, as web pages, or as pages for mobile devices. The idea of formatting text page-by-page or line-by-line sounds ridiculous and expensive. It’s an anachronism.

This is the background against which Kath gave her presentation. She presented research that shows first of all that the formatting of text on the page really does matter. You can view her presentation in full on Slideshare. She was talking about syntactic spacing which involves subtly increasing the spaces between syntactically significant phrases, while reducing the space between words within a phrase. Lines of text break at the end of a phrase, giving paragraphs a far more exaggerated “ragged-right” edge appearance than is usual. Kath discussed a specific commercial implementation of syntactic spacing called Readsmart. She presented results of research which showed a dramatic difference in comprehension and in subsequent action between regular text and text that had been reformatted with syntactic spacing, using Readsmart technology. If we want our readers to understand what we write and to take appropriate action based on what we write for them then we can’t afford to ignore this sort of insight, even if – especially if – it does not seem to align itself easily with current thinking in our profession.

One thing that I understood from Kath’s talk was that while adding syntactic spacing to texts gave measurable benefits to average and below average readers, as the educational level of the audience went up so the degree of improvement in comprehension went down. To put it bluntly, there was hardly any improvement for people with university level education, because comprehension levels for those people are already pretty high. This may mean that the benefits of syntactic spacing is not such a pressing problem for much of the work we call technical publications.

We are left with several questions to ponder.

• Can syntactic spacing be of benefit in technical publications? The research was apparently only done on short passages of text, which are not representative of most technical material. More research needs to be done on this before we can come to any conclusions.
• How does syntactic spacing mesh with accessibility requirements? These generally mean that websites need to allow visitors to change the size of the type on the page, which may well alter the positioning of line breaks. How would that affect the syntactic spacing of the text?
• Is it possible that one day a syntactic spacing technology such as Readsmart will be integrated into a structured authoring tool? How long will it be before that might happen?

But the real question that technical communicators need to consider is how we can take advantage of the sort of rigorous scientific approach to usability research that Kath’s work exemplifies in order to improve the “readability and persuasiveness” of the texts that we create?