How to Make Your Writing More Readable with Information Retrieval

If you're reading this article, it's probably safe to assume that you're familiar with the concept of information retrieval. But for those of you who have just stumbled onto this page by happenstance, I'll give you a quick definition: information retrieval is the art of creating written materials in such a way as to make the information within them easy to read, comprehend fully, and remember.

Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Certainly, but far too often, important documents containing written information, be they training manuals, user guides, or other types of instructions, fall alarmingly short of this ideal. Who among us hasn't had the experience of being forced to extract necessary information from some horribly convoluted and hard-to-read page, where the stuff we need to know is utterly indistinguishable from miles of drivel?

Alternately, we probably don't even notice when we're reading something user-friendly. We don't think about what aspects of the writing and the layout made it so easy to discover what we were looking for or notice the important bits of information we needed.

I consider myself something of an accidental expert on information retrieval. I'm not a business or technical writer (much) or in some other way professionally qualified, but I am an ADHD adult. As such, someone like me is the ultimate test of a document's IR strength; I easily lose patience with things that require extra focus and discerning reading skills. I mean, I can read them due to years of practice at dealing with my condition, but I still get frustrated. So, I've started to observe a few things that make the distinction between "easy-to-read" and "easy-to-throw-across-the-room-in-frustration."

The number one thing to avoid is a series bleak pages of unchanging, unbroken text. Just making sure that you have plenty of paragraph breaks is a great start all in its own! But before you put those paragraph breaks in, you have to make sure the text is ready for it: is it organized in a manner that makes sense, moving cleanly from one subject area to another in a chronological progression that makes sense? Each paragraphs needs to be a self-contained unit with no stream-of-consciousness jumping around from unrelated thought to unrelated thought. In the case of instructional materials, tasks need to be presented in the order they're to be performed.

The next concern is proper punctuation. Punctuation, though often thought of as cosmetic, can give us cues as to the meanings of sentences. Some of the worst punctuation mistakes, from the point of view of information retrieval, are a lack of necessary commas, too many unnecessary commas, run-on sentences, mile-long parentheticals, and a failure to use appropriate end-sentence punctuation (periods after questions, etc.).

Needless to say, polish your grammar and spelling just as carefully, and for the same reasons.

Once your text is clean, organized, and accurately spelled and punctuated, you can start to think about spicing it up a little. Things like changes in font, text sizes, colors, bold, underline, italics, capitalization, numbered or bulleted lists, boxes, exclamation points, etc., have the power to draw the eye to certain areas and indicate that the text in question is particularly important. You can also use these features to differentiate one section of text from another.

However, I would caution anyone to be extremely careful in how they use such special formatting. I've been handed pages where every word in the document is in some way big, bold, flashy, written in an eye-popping font or contained in some distracting geometric shape. Probably, the writers of these kinds of documents think that by doing this, they can make sure that I don't miss a word, but in truth this sort of thing is worse than a page of completely boring text. The effect is like being shouted at by eight different people at the same time, all surrounding me, and it makes me want to put the page down and never look at it again.

A far, far better idea is to take your page of neat, well-organized paragraphs and separate it into just a few sections using paragraph breaks and headers. Title or number the different sections and differentiate the titles using something like bold, underline, or a slightly larger text size.

Within your paragraphs, add emphasis to very important statements with bold, and use italics to emphasize words and syllables that would be spoken with emphasis (as I've done in this article), but in both cases, take care not to overdo it.

Use bullet lists only in places where you truly need to present information in a list format. With things like text in boxes, use in places where you need to present a little tidbit of important information that's not directly related to the rest of the narrative.

Last but not least, if you're going to add pictures to your document, be sure to ask yourself if they truly enhance the purpose of the document. Adding images just because they "look good" is okay to do just once or twice, but cluttering the document with unnecessary images will frustrate your reader.

Finally, once you have the finished product, give it to a couple of people to read over and ask their opinions. Observe how long it takes them to read it, and ask them a few questions afterward to see if they got the gist the way you hoped the would.

Ultimately, the only important test of a document's information retrieval strength is the reader!