If you want to make a good impression, you need to make sure that your documents are polished and professional, with every element right where readers expect it. Think about how you prepare for a job interview. You wear specific kinds of clothes. You carry specific accessories, depending upon your field. You make sure that you look polished, not wrinkly. Everything is exactly right and just as the interviewer expects it. Nothing is missing.
If you need help polishing your work, check out how to Make Your Boring Documents Look Professional in 5 Easy Steps, from The Visual Communication Guy. His post demonstrates easy changes you can make to jazz up your documents.
12 Comments
This article was super interesting and on point. The differences between the first example and last example of the writing was huge. The first example looked dense, uninteresting, and confusing. The last example, even though it covered an entire page, looked appealing, nicely spaced out, and gave me the impression that it contained important content. If you think about it, almost all of the activities or decisions that a person makes in a day are at least partially based off of first impressions of sight. So, if the appearance of an object is what initially catches a humans interest, then it is worth the effort of restructuring an essay or resume.
I loved the progression of the document as they changed the font, the margins, the spacing, and the indentation. I have seen many of the tips implemented for professional documents, but I haven’t seen any advice before about shortening the line length. I think that it depends on the type of professional writing whether the line length should be shortened. I can understand why a shorter line length would be valuable for an article, but I don’t see the shorter length being implemented for a technical report or proposal.
The article is actually very helpful. I was already using some of the steps, such as putting space between paragraphs, and removing the indents. However, I did not thought about using two fonts, or shrinking the line length. I don’t completely agree on using two different fonts, because I agree that using two different font will give distinction between the title and the body, but it might ruin the consistence and may seemed less professional. For my tips, I always try to use Times New Roman font which is the most standard font for professional writing.
The article is very helpful for a actual workplace. Some of the steps I have already used for my writings in my field. Some of them are very basic and i think people use them for a lot of writings. one of the step i feel is most help is Use Two Contrasting Fonts (other than the defaults) and Sizes. When I am writing the long term research paper, sometimes it can be more than 50 pages. “Two Font Rule” is very important to separate different content in the paper, it makes the reader easily to read and have good understanding on what they are reading for currently paragraph.
I read the “Make your Boring Documents Look Professional…” article because I thought it was interesting the two adjectives in the title: “Boring” and “Professional.” Usually I associate one with the other, but the article demonstrates how untrue that is. Boring can be sloppy and messy, but professional is polished and should be attention grabbing in order to get its message across. It gave some basic advice that we’ve been talking about a lot (space between paragraphs, no indents, and varying fonts for emphasis). It also gave some advice that I had not seen before such as shrinking line length/increasing margins so that your words are more concentrated in the middle of the page (like a book page). I thought this point was very interesting because I never would have considered doing that for a professional writing. I’m still not sure if that would be appropriate but I plan on doing more research.
I thought this article was very interesting. I didn’t know that it was professional to write in different fonts, but it makes sense because it provides a little contrast between what is said and how people view it. I also think shrinking the margins is interesting, but I think it makes the paper too long and I personally wouldn’t use that.
This article was very informative and helpful. I’ve always thought some of the papers I turn in for classes looked boring and unappealing, however, I have never known what I could fix to make it look better. I think these five simple steps went a long way to making the document look good. It was very cool to see the progression of the documents and compare the final one to the original. I felt as though the changes not only made the document look better, but it was also easier to read. It made me more willing to read the entire thing once it looked nice. I hope to start including some of these features in my own documents. Some of them would not be ideal for technical reports, such as lab reports. But i can definitely incorperate them into some assignments for this class.
While this article was simple, it communicated information that will have a large impact. The before and after pictures of the document show how effective these changes are. Over the best semester, we’ve had several discussion posts concerning formatting and making documents more appealing to readers and this article sums some of what we’ve learned fairly well. It addresses the need for a good heading and how indentation affects the readability of the document, Incredible to see how five minor adjustments transforms a document,
Long documents are usually boring to follow through. The writer can polish the document to look better and more interesting for readers. The 5 steps explained in the article is a great example for making a document look better. Using my personal experience, I tend to find it hard to read documents that has too much words just dumped on the paper. I like to see visuals, spaces, and good organization in order to keep me interested in reading a long document.
This article does one thing really well: fix up a typical boring document. The article also uses visual aids which help a lot. If you take it as is, it’s great. I feel that the article lacked slightly, though. What about sub-headings? How about how to get an image or figure in the document so that it looks good and isn’t too cluttered? I feel as though these are crucial parts of a typical document and not talking about them is a lapse in depth. Maybe 7 or 8 easy steps would have been more effective.
I really enjoyed how the document starts off boring in the beginning and progressively looks better as each step is applied to the document. I employ most of those characteristics in my documents except the two contrasting fonts, which looks really good when applied to their document. I usually just apply a bold font to the title to make it contrasting, but using two different fonts looks a lot better.
Presentation of documents for professional work is essential for not only professionalism but success in your profession. It makes it much easier for the audience to read and find the information that they desire. These five steps allow you to exactly this. Some of these things i already did, such as paragraph spacing and indentation, but they provided options i personally have never used. My primary focus is always organization and neatness. This allows the audience to find things with ease and read without many pains. Seeing the difference between the two documents was quite interesting and only proved how effective these steps are.