Structured documents

Writing forms an essential part of your work as a student of languages. Many of the different kinds of work that you will do use writing as their medium: research and taking notes; presentations; essays and dissertations; translations and other language exercises. Even day-to-day communications depend massively on keyboards and screens — think of email and all social media. Much of the writing you will do as students will involve the use of information technologies too and almost any variety of academic writing can make use of such tools.

An essay is a structured document

Take essay-writing as an instance. You will write many essays in the course of your studies and almost invariably these are nowadays produced using dedicated information technologies, typically word-processors. In some cases, they may be printed and read on paper; but equally they will be circulated electronically and read on screen. In either case, it pays to think about presentation as well as content — and to regard this as an aspect of the careful and precise thinking about language that is at the forefront of your work. In structured documents, these two aspects are interdependent.

Here is an image of what an essay might look like, using some placeholder text.

Several items of the structure of the document are immediately apparent. It contains body text, that is successive paragraphs of content, each of which has the same unjustified format. The first paragraph on the page is preceded by a heading in a different style. There are two block quotations, one of which appears to contain three lines of verse. The document contains two footnotes which are linked to the two block quotations, again in a different style, namely a smaller font size. These are the main visible elements of the design of the document. In addition, you can see two further elements that form part of the page design: a header and a footer, each containing information that will be repeated from page to page.

Make the structure of your document intelligible

These are some of the main components of a typical essay and an application like a word-processor allows you to make the structure of your essay explicit.

Using word-processors and other tools, you can mobilize typographical conventions to make the structure of your document clear.

Here, for instance, what are termed small capitals are used to denote headings as a structural element of the document. They are also used for headers and footers. Using the same style for all of these components makes the structured hierarchy of your document more intelligible, without multiplying visual variants to excess.