When you open a magazine, your eyes are usually met with gorgeous photography and catchy headings. Once your eyes have taken in those "hey, look at me!" items, you see subtitles, captions, and you may even start reading an article. The more you settle into a page, the more your eyes will finally pay attention to the small stuff – things like punctuation. If you're reading in your first language or are extremely competent in your second, punctuation errors in a grammatical context will fly off the page and smack you in the face. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about punctuation consistency in formatting. These are often the little droplets that can determine how polished a piece can look.
A table of contents in a magazine is usually a lot more complex than one in a book. A magazine has to hold the reader's attention to prevent a quick thumbing through of the pages. That's why even the table of contents page is often filled with pictures, captions and advertising. As there is so much else for the reader to look at, it's easy to get away with inconsistent use of periods at the end of subheadings or the irregular use of dashes and bullets. However, punctuation consistency could very well be the final sheen that seals the deal of how professional the table of contents looks.
I'm picking on the contents page, but really consistency in formatting details is necessary in an entire publication. Anyone with a trained eye (and some without) will notice if one bulleted clause ends in a period and the next one doesn't. That text detective will notice if there's a space after a dash here but not there. Content and aesthetics should go hand in hand, and formatting details are committed to both. If you want your reader to have no distractions from your articles, pictures, captions and carefully selected advertising, then it's worth giving these little flecks of formatting their due.
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