Читать книгу Writing Scientific English - Timothy Skern - Страница 39

A clean and legible layout is vital to the success of written work. A poorly laid out piece of work may discourage the reader and prevent him or her from discovering its contents. The following five simple suggestions for a clean and legible layout of an A4 page are based on the requirements of the majority of scientific journals for the preparation of manuscripts.

❚ Use double-spaced text

This stops the text from appearing crowded and allows the reader to write comments and corrections between the lines.

❚ Use justified format

This makes the text fit to the page margins. Consequently, the reader's eye does not have to permanently adjust to a different line length.

❚ Use 12 point text with Arial or Helvetica as your standard font

In my opinion, Arial and Helvetica are fonts that are easy to read and are available on almost every computer. In contrast, Times Roman is much more tiring to read because the letters have different widths and thicknesses. Calibri, the default font of Word 2010, is also acceptable.

❚ Indent your paragraphs

To indent means to move the first line of a paragraph inwards.

❚ Use sub-headings

Using sub-headings in a long block of text informs the reader that the author is introducing a new topic.