Mark Kleiman- Legible Blogging

Mark Kleiman’s website “The Reality Based Community,” is an easy to read blog that incorporates short, succinct paragraphs. It is a highly legible blog, but it is not without its design flaws.

Length of text: Kleiman’s blogs are usually fairly short and include paragraphs of about two to six sentences. His posts are simple and don’t require pages upon pages of reading, which can be daunting for blog readers.

Scannability: Kleiman’s blog is easily scannable and doesn’t include continuous blocks of text. He and other contributors to the blog use short paragraphs and divide up the text with links to other sites with related material. These links are colored dark blue to make them visually stand-out.

Chunking: The only chunking in the blog occurs when the author uses other sources and pulls quotes from them. These quotes are usually highlighted in a lighter shade of blue than links, so they easily stand out from other text.

Headlines: The headlines in this blog leave something to be desired. They are clear and easily identifiable but there are never and subheads or bulleted lists. Some of the headlines are not descriptive of the content which is a bit confusing. At least a different font is used to make the headline distinct.

Copy Editing: So far I have not discovered many misspelled words or grammatical errors in Kleiman’s blog. Occasionally an error appears like the one I found today that should say “collecting sales tax” but says “collecting sale s tax.” Whoops, looks like someone forgot to use spell check.

Use of Inverted Pyramid: For the most part it appears that Kleiman’s posts begin with a gist of the subject and then proceed to add more detail as they go. However, some of the posts are so short and opinion-based that there is really no need to use the inverted pyramid.

Page Titles: Kleiman’s blog does a good job of giving each page a title related to the post. However, when one clicks on a subject "category" from the left-side navigation bar, a page pops-up with every post in that category. One then has to click on an individual post to get a proper page title that is not overwhelming.

Legibility: According to Nielsen’s standards, Kleiman’s blog has optimal legibility as most of the text is black on a white background. Any remaining text is dark or light blue so it is legible and easy to read. The font is not too small and none of the text moves or does any distracting flash animation.

The top item on Kleiman’s blog as of this post is titled “Wish-I’d-said-that-Dep’t,” which is a horrible headline as it doesn’t say much to the blog’s content. It starts with a quote by Thoreau and proceeds to talk about the New Jersey Star-Ledger’s editorial on Jon Corzine and Chris Daggett. According to Kleiman, the editorial’s remarks will help Corzine get re-elected as governor, even though the remarks were negative.