Make Your Documents Scannable

Use the following techniques to make your pages scannable.

Bolding/Italics

To make keywords stand out, highlight words by bolding.

• Highlight only key information-carrying words.
• Avoid highlighting entire sentences or long phrases, since a scanning eye can only pick up two (or at most three) words at a time.
• Use italics to make figure captions or sentences or phrases stand out. 
• Don't use italics for large blocks of text since italic typefaces are slower to read online.

Underlining

Underlined text, especially bright blue underlined text, usually denotes a hypertext link (on most browsers, bright blue underlined text is the default for a link). Avoid confusing your readers by staying away from underlining non-linkable text on your site.

Headings

Use headings to make major points.  Your readers should be able to scroll down the page and read your major points without stopping.

• Convey the main ideas presented in the page with headings.
• Make heading text informative, and able to stand on its own and make sense without the rest of the content text. 
• Don't try to be clever or "cute" since users rely on scanning and your headings to pick up the meaning of your content text.
• Do not interrupt the continuity of the page with headings. Those users reading the entire page should rely on the headings as highlights to reinforce their reading.

Subheads

• Use subheads to break up long stretches of text.
• Make subheads bold, in color, or both, with white space above and text close below.
• Avoid using subheads with only two to three lines of text following them.

Lists

• Bulleted and numbered lists slow down the scanning eye and can draw attention to important points.
• Use numbered lists when the order of entries is important.
• Use unnumbered lists whenever the sequence of the entries is not important.
• Limit the number of items in a single list to no more than nine.