Do you use indentation for readability?

Indentation is a simple but powerful way to make your content easier to scan. When used wisely, it helps readers quickly see structure, hierarchy, and relationships between elements like questions and answers, examples, or nested lists. Overdoing it, however, can make layouts feel uneven or cramped—especially on mobile.

When indentation helps 👍

• Nested Q&A sections – When displaying questions and answers, a slight indent helps visually distinguish them and clarify their context
• Lists or structured data – Indenting bullet points, numbered lists, or code blocks improves scannability

When indentation hurts 👎

• Body text under headings – Regular paragraphs should normally be left-aligned with the heading, not indented. Indenting them breaks alignment and creates uneven left edges, which hurts readability
• Mobile layouts – Indentation reduces usable width and can make text feel cramped on smaller screens
• SEO and accessibility – Overusing indentation via CSS (e.g., padding-left) doesn’t add semantic value and might even confuse screen readers or cause inconsistent spacing

Q&A sections - Best practices for emails

Written communication can easily cause misunderstandings. Help the reader understand your message better by:

• Using “>” and indentation when quoting the text from others, like the original email you are replying to.
  Note: “>” is not needed when quoting from a web page
• Make the question/task followed by the respective answer in a logical order
• Add numbers to tasks if the sender forgot.
  Mention you changed the history. E.g. “(added numbers to tasks in the history, so we can clearly refer to them)”
• Your text should be always kept to the left

This way you won't forget any questions in the original email.

Note: You do not need to use ">" and indentation, when you are replying to the task that is very clear, because in this case extra text reduces clarity.

❌ Figure: Bad example - There's too much information with no reasonable order

❌ Figure: Bad example - Order is OK, but it's using quotes to reference others' text + no indentation + missing numbers on questions/tasks

🙂 Figure: OK example - Even with ">", indentation and numbers, without spacing the text becomes cramped and hard to read

✅ Figure: Good example - You can clearly see the context of each part of the reply

Indentation with Markdown

When using Markdown (usually on GitHub), use ">" symbol (which means HTML blockquote) to achieve a similar result.

Figure: Indenting tasks in Markdown

Figure: How it looks

You can find more info about GitHub Markdown syntax at Basic writing and formatting syntax.

Video: Top 10+ Rules to Better Email Communication with Ulysses Maclaren