I wonder if the results would still be the same or if the opposite would be found. I am also interested in a study would compare students with varying exceptionalities- dyslexia, visual processing disorders, etc. As the teacher from the UK pointed out, I also always use Comic Sans for my beginning readers because the letters are formed similarly to how I’m teaching them to write. I wonder what percentage of people who don’t bother to read things actually retain the information they didn’t read?Īs a teacher, I find this study very interesting. If you want to turn people away entirely, using poor typography is a good way to go, especially if you think a study supports the idea. If your information is perceived as easy to read, people will then be more likely to actually read that information. Therefore, good typesetting and good font choices are still key to encouraging people to read materials. Had you set this in a bad font, I would’ve cursed aloud and closed the window promptly. I elected to read this blog post from you, and I did so because it looked easy to read and the subject material was interesting to me. In real life, reading is done at our whim. Either they read the material or they don’t participate in the study and presumably don’t get their $50. These subjects weren’t given the option of choice. While retention of that material may have been higher when bad fonts were used, this all still hinges on willingness to read. Hence, they were told “here read this.” The subjects all felt that they were needed to read the given materials, and so despite the poor typesetting and poor fonts, they read through everything. The studied gathered adults and gave them a requirement to read. I don’t find this study to have basis on reality. The Comic Sans photo is used with permission from passive-aggressive notes. This research was led by Danny Oppenheimer at Princeton University and appears in the January 2011 issue of Cognition. I might suggest to other LWONers that we change the blog’s font, too, except I’m afraid of anti-Comic Sans wrath… I’m certainly impressed, and already trying to figure out how I can read scientific manuscripts in Comic Sans. We have to concentrate more, and this helps with memory. The researchers propose that when we see an illegible font, our brains have to ramp up their processing power in order to read it. This happened in every subject tested - chemistry, English, history and physics. Students who had received the ugly handouts scored higher on tests of the material than did their peers who had used normal type. (In fact, one teacher refused to pass out the materials in Haettenschweiler.) For up to a month, some students received the materials in italicized Comic Sans, some in Haettenschweiler and some in Monotype Corsiva - all of which are difficult to read. In a second experiment, the team changed the fonts of PowerPoint slides and classroom handouts for a variety of classes taken by 222 high school students. But would this font-switching strategy do any good in a real classroom? The results have enormous implications for education. (There was no difference between the two annoying fonts.) The volunteers who learned the information in Arial answered 73 percent of the questions correctly, whereas those who read it in hard-to-read fonts had 87 percent accuracy. They were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on their retention with questions such as What color eyes does the norgletti have? The participants saw these characteristics listed in either gray, obnoxious Comic Sans MS, or gray, delicate Bodoni MT, or black, clear-as-day Arial font, and had 90 seconds to memorize the lists. What if I didn’t care about the ease with which you flipped through my book, but with the amount of information you retained from it? In that case, the fourth option is actually the worst choice, according to a new study.Īttempting to reconstruct a biological taxonomy lesson, the researchers asked 28 adult volunteers to learn about the norgletti and two other kinds of aliens, each of which had seven features. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces.