So you’ve written. You’ve edited. You’ve revised. You’ve analyzed every last word for sound and meaning. 

If you work in corporate America, you’ve had subject-matter experts and lawyers review your work. If you don’t, your critique group has shared its feedback.

You’ve pondered, pruned and polished again. You’ve worried and wondered.

Are you done?

That depends.

Have you thought about how your copy looks?

Is it … accessible?

If you aren’t sure, set your carefully crafted prose aside and then – a few hours later – glance at it again like it just appeared on your “to-be-read pile” for the first time.

What do you think? Does it look like something that would be easy to breeze through? Or does it look like … work?

People are busy. If your copy isn’t something they asked for and are eagerly awaiting, they don’t have much incentive to plow through it if it looks off-putting. Just like plating is important in fine dining, accessibility is important in writing.

What can you do to make your copy more accessible? Try these tips:

- Use a font that’s easy to read. I like Times Roman for print and Arial for e-mail.

- Make your point size big enough. You can’t go wrong with 12-point.

- Add white space. Have one-inch margins. Use short paragraphs. Nothing makes a manuscript look less inviting than seemingly unending paragraphs of dense gray type.

- Use subheads and bullets, if possible. Subheads, bullets and sidebars give readers logical places to enter your manuscript. They help skimmers skim and draw in busy or reluctant readers.

- Have a short, catchy first sentence. And set if off by itself if you can.

- Use black type on white paper.

- Bold key words. But remember, less is always more.

Lots of writers think accessibility doesn’t matter. But it does. I edit lots of stories in my day job, and when there’s a stack on my desk I often go through and do the ones that follow these rules first. They just look friendlier and like they’ll cause me less pain.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I sent a brief e-mail out at work recently and got the following response:

“Nicely formatted and written. There’s nothing I like more than an Arial 12-point e-mail with judicious use of bold and bullets. So easy to read.”

And that, after all, is what any writer wants.