"...After 10 days, your introductory 1.9% APR jumps to 99.9%. Also, we get to eat your dog."

They always warn you to read the fine print. What if it’s so fine you literally can’t read it?

If you can’t read the text above, we understand. Here’s a tip not everyone knows: to quickly enlarge scalable type on a website, hold down the Ctrl key and tap the + [plus] key. (To shrink it back down, do Ctrl and - [minus].)

It works on every major web browser. Try it now if you like. (Take your time. We’ll wait.)

But you shouldn’t have to do that. With printed copy, you can’t do it. That doesn’t keep many writers from using copy so small it’s unreadable.

Maybe you have 20/20 vision, or even better. Not everyone does. Older readers, especially, struggle with reading small font sizes. That doesn’t just mean the elderly: eyesight begins to decline around the age of 40. Do you really want to restrict your readership solely to people under 40?

We see this problem a lot, most particularly — and most unfortunately — in fundraising brochures and letters.

Think about it: funrdraising materials are (most often) targeted to older readers, those with the most acquired wealth or chief executives. Few are intended for recent college graduates or people on the south side of middle age.

Many prospective benefactors wear bifocals because they can’t read small print. Some wear “cheaters,” magnifying glasses which they put on and take off and frequently lose.

It is not unusual for farsighted persons, frustrated at not being able to decipher tiny text and angered at the “thoughtlessness” of the writer, to discard the document within minutes (or even seconds) of picking it up. You very well might lose a potential donor forever.

Of course, one can go overboard with font sizes. You don’t want your font text to be so large it reads “obnoxious” or feels like its shouting at the reader. You have to find a happy medium.

At We Write For You, we have had to ask graphic designers to enlarge — and sometimes even change — fonts for readability.

Sure, sometimes we’d like to have the latitude to use smaller fonts for various aesthetic purposes. But we generally will never use a font size that can’t be read by virtually all readers.

Remember the ultimate purpose for writing a document: to have it read.