Watch out for font legibility problems. Learn from Print On the crucial issue of scan-style reading there are lessons to be learned from the print world. The types of printed material people are most likely to scan-read are brochures and manuals. Although the two are very different, they can both teach us something. Brochures go for eye-catching phrases, short sentences, a direct personal approach and show only a middling respect for the rules of grammar.
Manuals are another world.
They know they're boring, long and unattractive. In compensation they try to break themselves up into clear sections with lots of titles, subtitles and keywords. A good manual will also add variation to large swathes of text with bullet points, italics, a change of font - anything that stops it becoming an undifferentiated mass of grey. The problem with brochure-style writing is that it's more suited to the short sprint than the marathon. After a few hundred words it can get pretty tedious.