Lists are your friend
Paragraphs are great, but you can have too much of a good thing.
Have you written three or four paragraphs? Throw in a bulleted list to give the reader some variety.
Have you trapped a list inside a paragraph? Release it!
Have you written steps? Format them as a numbered list.
Notice the difference this formatting change makes. Items that are formatted as lists are quicker to skim.
When do lists become your enemy?
When you’ve written paragraphs, but you put dots in front of them
When you’ve got sub-bullets and sub-sub bullets
When you’ve written paragraphs, but you put dots in front of them
Like this:
This is a bad idea – it moves text to the right for no good reason. The F-pattern below shows that people’s eyes hug the left-hand margin. It’s better to left-align by using paragraph formatting when you’ve actually written paragraphs.
When you’ve got sub-bullets and sub-sub-bullets
Like this:
All those indentations create an impression of complexity that will scare readers off.
Here’s how I’d reformat the list above
I’d move everything a step to the left:
Make the bullets that have no sub-bullets into their own list at the start.
Make the rest of the bullets into list intros.
Make the sub-bullets into bullets.
Make the sub-sub bullets into sub-bullets.
It would end up looking something like this:
Notice that any sub-bullets are sitting tidily at the ends of their lists, not breaking the flow of bullets somewhere in the middle. This gives readers the impression that you created a thoughtful hierarchy.