If Fonts Could Talk
Have you ever asked yourself, If my manuscript's typeface could talk, what would it say? What kind of impression does this font give readers, and does it really affect the reading experience all that much?
When I worked on Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art as a poetry reviewer, I discovered that a writer's choice of font could make or break his or her poem in my mind. Certain typefaces—like Comic Sans, Curlz, or Courier New—repelled me, while others—like Times New Roman, Palatino, or Adobe—reeled me in. My colleagues noticed the same phenomenon, and one of them decided to conduct an experiment.
Without telling anyone, the poetry coordinator (hereby known as K) mixed into our submissions pile a handful of poems by famous writers. But before mixing them in he typed them up in various fonts. Those poems that he had typed in more conventional fonts, like Times New Roman, were awarded more points during the reviewing process than those that he had typed in, say, Comic Sans. Furthermore, the smaller fonts were more successful than the larger fonts, and poems that were aligned to the right or left far surpassed poems that were centered.
I won't pretend that this was a thoroughly scientific study. Of course we're ignoring certain variables: some of us may have just preferred the poems that scored more points, regardless of the font, or maybe K didn't do a great job of choosing equally accomplished writers.
Yet there's something to be said for choosing carefully when choosing a font. You shouldn't have to over-embellish with a fanciful script—your writing should speak for itself.
Go simple and go classic. Times New Roman never gets old, at least not for editors and publishers, who spend all day looking at screens and can't be bothered to squint at computer-generated cursive. Even something like Calibri or Cambria is better than Comic Sans or Calligrafitti! (Be sure to adjust the size, though, when you adjust the typeface itself. Different fonts look better at different sizes.)
