CRAP tells you to put related things close together (proximity) and to make like things look alike (repetition), but it does not explain why those moves work. The Gestalt principles, which come from early-twentieth-century perception research, do. They describe how the human eye automatically organizes what it sees into groups and wholes, before conscious thought. A handful matter most for document design: Proximity: elements placed near one another are read as related. (This is the same insight CRAP borrows.) Similarity: elements that share a color, shape, size, or font are read as belonging together, even when they sit far apart. Continuity: the eye follows lines and alignments and expects them to continue, which is part of why alignment feels orderly. Closure: the eye fills in gaps to perceive complete shapes, which is how a logo made of fragments still reads as a whole. Figure and ground: we separate a foreground object from its background, which is the work that white space and contrast quietly do. Common region: elements inside a shared boundary, such as a box or a shaded panel, are read as a group even without proximity.

Throat clearing phrases are unnecessary to understand the meaning of the text. These include phrases like “It should be noted that,” “in order to,” and “the fact that.” When you see a phrase like this, try deleting it and see if any meaning is lost. While these types of phrases are common in the corporate world, they essentially feel like jargon. Jay Sullivan, author of Simply Said refers to these as “zero words” because they aren’t really doing any work for your meaning

A prompt is a rhetorical act: it sets an audience, a purpose, a tone, and a set of constraints, and it draws on exactly the skills technical communicators have always practiced. One accessible way to teach this is the Role, Task, Voice, and Context approach: Define who the AI should act as (role) Tell it what it should do (task) Specify the tone it should use (voice) Provide the background information it needs to get the task right (context).

If you are still in your degree or newly finished, you may feel you have little to put on a résumé. You have more than you think. Coursework, and especially project-based coursework, is legitimate, relevant experience, and for an internship or an entry-level role in your field, it is often more relevant than the unrelated work experience you already have. A technical communication major who waited tables has real transferable skills worth listing, but a course project in which she designed and usability-tested a set of instructions speaks far more directly to a documentation internship than the restaurant job does.