Chapter Seven
170
Fonts
According to plain language experts, text in books and periodicals should
be in ordinary Roman text, as the serifs give quick visual clues to readers
of the letters in long passages. Transcend has suggested instead that text is
usually short in court forms that apply plain language rules, and sans serif
fonts work better then. In Washington State, it was decided that Arial 11-
point type will be the standard font for the new plain language court
forms.^13
Plain language experts have generally suggested that serif fonts are
better for most text and sans serif fonts are better for large headlines. This
standard was created as a result of Colin Wheildon’s 1995 book Type and
Layout: How Typography and Design can get your Message Across—or
Get in the Way (Wheildon 1995), which proclaimed the virtues of serif
fonts for extended reading. Alex Poole has criticized the experiments that
Wheildon and others have conducted. Other experiments have suggested
that font preference and readability may be more the result of what the
reader is used to. Some usability studies have concluded that text on
computer screens should not include serifs because the number of pixels
available do not allow the serifs to be as crisp and readable as would be in
ordinary print on paper. Of course, improved and larger computer screens
and the availability to increase fonts on screen may well have negated that
problem. Then again, as soon as that problem is solved, we find that many
Americans, especially those who are poor, access the internet (and
possibly read court forms) only through their smart phones, with very
small screens compared to computer screens. Once again, the type of font
may well affect readability.
Personally, I find the debate inconclusive and do believe that Poole’s
criticism of the experiments may have some points. From a cognitive
perspective, we know that symbols in general are something that humans
learn, and a usage-based approach is probably the most likely to provide
answers (Tomasello 2005). Stanislaus Deheane notes that we have some
idea where the invariance problem resides in the brain (in the temporal
lobe), but we do not know exactly how the brain solves it. The invariance
problem, as cognitive psychologists refer to it, is, in this instance, the
ability to read the same letter or word, regardless of font, font size,
boldface or italics or capital letters. We slow down when we see
(^13) Older readers usually prefer serif fonts, such as Times Roman, but younger
readers prefer sans-serif fonts, such as Arial.