He said the study showed the whole history of typography was had missed the point when it comes to learning.

And proof-reading?

Vindication for anyone who wants to set their next academic journal in Curlz, I suppose...

First,
the idea that Helvetica and Arial are 'legible' text book fonts is just flawed. That being said, I do see how such an effect is possible. When I needed to retain information for an exam, I would often read the text up-side-down, which slowed my reading and definitely helped me remember much better.

Love it how the words "Bold" and "and the Italicised" are set as images instead of actual text, so that as far as the article metadata is concerned, its title is "Fortune favors the  (): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes"

LOL...

You can hear Lehrer being interviewed, in a half-hearted breakfast show way, here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pklr0UD9eSo

And signing here... or that another Leher?

:o)

Hey BeauW I can't tell if you're kidding..?

The novel value of a different typeface might have something to do with it? Could it be that even if they begin to set all educational material in Comic Sans Italic, eventually that'll become the same over and over and suddenly Helvetica is the one that stick in readers minds longer.

I think it is pure tripe.

The novelty, perhaps has an effect, but it amounts to tying a new string around your finger for every new thing you want or need to remember. Pretty soon, it is a method that is worse than useless.

Next thing, my employer will learn that buying ergonomically well designed chairs for their staff was a mistake because someone somewhere will find that fewer people fall asleep in chairs that ruin their backs.

This emperor is stark naked.

A great piece of research.

It will really soften academic publishers up to using learning-friendly Shinntype fonts such as Fontesque, which is available in an optically scaled version suitable for lengthy texts.

I wonder what typeface this research paper was set in, Papyrus or Comic Sans?

Probably Blackadder ITC.

This sounds like a piece of bad research, if accurately reported, as the report doesn't mention any control for time. Of course, if you have to spend ten minutes deciphering a paragraph, reading it slowly and repeatedly, you are more likely to remember it.

The idea of high readability, at least for non-fiction, is that you can read quickly for meaning, and remember what *you* find valuable, not what is forced upon you by repetition from having to puzzle it out.

Also for extended text if it is really difficult to read, you are not likely to read it at all.

@oneweioranother
If you are thinking I'm kidding about not finding Helvetica a readable text face- having to read a whole textbook set in Helvetica really drove me nuts. I was continually having to re-read paragraphs because my brain insisted on seeing letters instead of words. The font is just too regular for extended text. I know a lot of designers disagree, but I really don't like to see more than one paragraph at a time set in Helvetica. Not that I'm against all sans settings. Just not Helvetica (and really not Univers).

(I'm also not kidding about turning my text books upside down.)

BTDT:

http://typophile.com/node/75551

Good response by Paul Luna on the LUCiD blog: http://lucidity.ning.com/profiles/blogs/pretty-ugly

I read the article, but I don't remember a word of it; must be the legible font;)