Hartley, J.(1996). Text Design. In Kozma, R. B. (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, Section IV: Hard Technologies: Media-Related Research. pp. 795-820. IN: Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

The author presents research supporting many considerations related to text design. One of them is the text layout and how the structure and access benefit the reader, in for example, searching and rereading. Some of the devices investigated by the author are: titles, summaries, outlines, boxes, headings, subheadings, sequencing, and lists. He also found that authors use them to help readers follow the organization of arguments.

The benefits that the readers get from using these devices are:

• Titles: describe the content in few words and help focus attention and expectations;
• Summaries: helps in the decision on reading the text.
• Outlines: depict the structure of the text and often is presented in a graphic form;
• Boxes: increase comprehension of the main idea in the text when they includes supporting material;
• Headings: help search, recall and retrieval;
• Sequencing: helps follow events when they are in temporal order;
• Sequencing lists: help clarified, which parts belong to a whole.

Texts designed to learn application software tools are examples on how text layout facilitates access to specific topics. Everyday technology changes so quickly that is impossible to master software at the same rate. It is better to know where and how to search the information needed. So, a good text layout can help the reader access topics easily.

Every time I want to learn new software, I got a book on how to use it. It gives me an idea of the things that can be done. I used a lot the table of contents or outlines to decide the order in which I will look at the topics or to facilitate the access when I need to learn a specific task. Outlines are lists of titles and subtitles that present the reader the structure of a text as a whole including all its parts.