Interesting Observation on Essay Fonts
Phil Renaud has observed a relationship between font faces and essay mark. He used past 52 papers that he had written throughout his university study, and he grouped all those essays into different category of font faces and calculated at the average marks. Surprisingly, essays with Serif font has better marks than with Sans-Serif font:
… At first, I’m just relieved to be doing so well. Still, ever the skeptic, I start to wonder: what exactly am I doing differently now to be getting all these A-range paper grades all of the sudden?
I haven’t drastically changed the amount of effort I’m putting into my writing. I’m probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies, and while I guess you could argue that I’m probably just being a great example of practice making perfect, I’ve got my doubts; I even used to take courses concentrating on writing better essays, and in the time surrounding that, my grades were pretty low.
Then it hits me: the only thing I’ve really changed since I’ve been getting these grades is…
my essay font.
Long story short, this throws me into something of a panic: I keep all my essays’ final copies in storage, so I go through every scholarly paper I’ve written for the past few years in hopes of garnering some sort of makeshift empirical results with regards to my essay styles…
However a population of 52 papers may not be enough to totally prove the theory. But nevertheless it is an interesting observation and it is a good hack to try it if you ever writing an essay.
The Secret Lives of Fonts - [fad.tastic]
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Comments
Malcolm says on March 14th, 2006 at 6:55 am
I’ve always understood this to be about readability - on the printed page (as opposed to the screen) serif fonts produce better readability (the serifs tend to ‘join up’ the letters). If something is more readable then it’s likely to get better marks.
R says on June 4th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
It definitely is about readability. As a university professor who often has scores of papers to read, anything that helps me with the grading process is appreciate. Since I began requiring my students to submit their papers electronically, I will change any sans serif font to a serif font.