Here is an excerpt from an article written by Dan Pallotta for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Ever get looped into an e-mail thread on the fifth round and tried to figure out which part you’re supposed to read? All you see is a tangle of text chunks indented with strange characters and punctuated with outdated header information and worthless “Thanks!” replies.

Whether you know it or not, when you compose an e-mail, you’re designing. When you reply to an e-mail, you’re designing. When you assemble a grant proposal, a business plan, an executive summary, you’re designing.

And good design gives you an edge. How big an edge? It’s the difference between getting read or getting ignored. You don’t have to understand Photoshop or other design programs to be able to create clean business communications. You just have to develop an eye for the difference between visual order and visual noise.

Everyone could benefit from taking an introductory design course at a local college or reading a great design book, like Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. But if you don’t have time for that, here are some basic rules:

[Here are only a few of several that Pallotta suggests. To read the complete article, please click here.]

• Blur your eyes and ask yourself, “Does this communication have a sense of order, or does looking at it give me a headache?”

• Have the decency to shorten your communication. Follow the wise insight attributed equally to Twain, Churchill, Pascal, and Lincoln (“If I had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”) or Richard Bach’s maxim (“Good writing is all about the power of the deleted word”) and remember that length is design, too.

• Clean up messes. If you’re sending someone a conversation thread but only one sentence of it is important, delete the extraneous 42,000 words. Delete automatically generated dotted lines, indentations, and fonts in multiple colors.

• Reduce the number of hard returns, especially in e-mails. They create visual noise.

• Avoid huge monolithic blocks of text. No one will read them.

• Don’t get fancy. If you haven’t taken a design course, stick with a classic font. Don’t use more than three font variations on a page. That means changing typeface, size, or style (italics or bold). Don’t underline.

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If you forget all this, just think simplicity. Less is more. Good design doesn’t add stuff. It takes stuff away. Don’t get fancy, don’t overdo anything, don’t use gimmicks. Simplicity and power are not mutually exclusive. They are often one and the same.

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Dan Pallotta is an expert in nonprofit sector innovation and a pioneering social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Pallotta TeamWorks, which invented the multiday AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days. He is the president of Springboard and the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential.