I am not an English literature professor or anything like that - in fact my first day of senior English in high school I dropped from highest level to the lowest. But the choices of a teenager based on which class his best friend and a certain beautiful girl were in can't change that I am actually pretty decent with the language - I have always been an avid reader, I have a great vocabulary, I am good at spelling, and have usually excelled at writing tasks, to the point that writing documentation and editing the work of others was often a task delegated to me in my past jobs. But, hey, I understand we didn't all have the benefits of that background too!

So I've put together a list of dos & don'ts based on examples of writing from around the web that I hope can help other people out here.

Except under certain circumstances (let's call those circumstances "artistic expression"), please stick to the normal conventions of writing!

DON'T TYPE YOUR POST IN ALL CAPS

Our brains are wired by years of exposure to read in a certain way - including scanning text, keeping track of our progress in the document, and gathering surface information without reading in depth. This system in our brains has less to do with individually identifying the letters themselves, but relies heavily on relative size of the letters and additional spacing from punctuation.

It makes it significantly harder for the human eye/brain combo to scan text effectively when we take away the difference in size of the letters. We also remove emphasis from acronyms by capitalizing everything around them, and can even cause some confusion - DO YOU PLAY BASEBALL WITH A BAT, OR DO YOU EARN BAT FROM YOUR BROWSER??

This brings me to my next point....

don't write everything in all lowercase

For exactly the same reason as above - we make the text harder to read, we de-emphasize acronyms, and we can cause confusion - especially in the cryptocurrency space. Coins such as BAT, KICK, DASH, ETC, ATOM, LINK and REP could all lead to lowercase confusion because context of a sentence cannot always tell you the meaning of the word.

Don't make your whole post bold!

It looks OK as a font weight for a heading, but when you have a wall of text that looks the same it is not so easy to read. In fact it is more difficult to read, because you have reduced the space between letters relative to the weight of the letters themselves!

Websites (attempt to) choose font sizes that are appealing to the majority of displays and consumers, so changing the size and/or weight of the entirety of the text can make your post harder to read. If you personally think your text is too small you should only change your display - not the rendering of the text in the site for everyone else too.

Bold text should only be used for emphasis, not for everything. And while I'm talking about size....

Don't use other weird styles for your posts either

For the same reasons as above, changing the size or style of your font affects everyone. Use the default styles for text, then you and anybody else who wants to change it, can do so just in their browser, instead of making everyone see the same wall of massive text!!

Don't align your text in weird and wonderful ways

Using non-standard font alignments for the language you are writing in (or mixing and matching them) is rarely good for readability. You force the brain to switch from one mode of reading too quickly and the brain gets fatigued.

Except for that mythical artistic expression don't right align your text

(unless you are writing in an RTL language, then please right align your text, but don't left align it!)

Centered text can also be more difficult to read.

Our brains thrive on patterns, familiarity, and reliability, and centered text removes some of our familiar and reliable ways to track progress in documents.

It is up to you if you left-align or justify - personally I have always found left-aligned to be more comfortable than justified, especially on the web.

Use paragraphs

A big wall of text is bad - just look at my first paragraph in this post! It was the first thing I noticed when I started to re-read my draft of this post, and it inspired this point. You should hit that enter key after the smaller, more logical breaks in your text.

Especially if you are changing direction or topic slightly like I just did with this sentence.

Use punctuation

We can't all be the masters of when to use a : versus a ; or a - versus starting a new sentence or putting something in brackets, and honestly some of it does just come down to personal preference, and some of it I'm still not good at.

But there is one rule in all of the English language that should not be broken in normal writing it is this: end your sentences with punctuation!

Whether it is a question mark, an exclamation mark, or a trusty old full-stop, in typical written sentences, you use the one most appropriate to the tone of your sentence.

Also if your sentences run on for a bit, or a have natural "side point" like in this sentence, you should use commas. It helps our brains separate concepts and can often make your sentences more understandable.

For a fairly contrived example of how forgetting commas can cause hilarity and confusion, one of my favourite snacks right now is tuna, pepper, and Tabasco sauce. But if I left out the commas people would be wondering what the hell a tuna pepper is!!

For a lot of the above points follow this simple rule - you (the author) should be in control of the content and the emphasis within that content. The reader should always (always!! except for where our good old artistic expression is concerned) be left in full control of the font and the default size of the text.

Also be aware of the effect some of these problems can have on assistive technologies like screen readers. Forgetting punctuation and abuse of headings is especially bad for the accessibility of people using text-to-speech!

Final note

This was actually meant to be my entry into the PublishOx tutorial competition waaaay back in February, but thanks to traveling half way around the world at the time I didn't quite get this out within the deadline, then it got sidelined while a lot of other life happened and the world started to fall apart. But I don't see a point in throwing away decent content so I finally polished it off, and here it is!