What sets educational text formatting apart

Let's think about how text formatting helps us learn.

We won't be learning academic style guides like APA, don't worry. Here we'll learn how to use formatting by taking into account a) the learner and b) the medium in which the text may be placed.

We have these two concerns for a few reasons.

You surely know this already: formatting helps guide the learner to the parts of the text we consider important, and it also makes reading easier. Now we're going to take that a step further.

A quick example: how many times have you opened a blog article after searching Google for "how to..." and skimmed through the text until you found the part you were looking for?

We have to help our learners find the content they're looking for (heutagogy). We do that through lesson titles as well as the specific text.

(By the way, that way of reading in the example is called scanning.)

Through formatting, we make content easier to absorb and understand, set priorities and add other functions. In the next module, we'll also talk about writing techniques.

Finally, by applying formatting principles, we make life easier for whoever has to move that content into the most varied media: rich-text editors, presentations, PDFs, IDEs (programming environments) and more. In other words, depending on how you format your text, you may make things harder for whoever will use it.

In this module we'll learn how to apply text formatting to improve our audience's learning.