Penance

• 20 Oct 2010
• typography comprehension
• permalink

Now we learn that poor font selection can improve reading comprehension. Comic Sans makes you understand things better. Heaven help us.

There’s an interesting idea at the center of this: that putting your reader to work increases their engagement with the text. It puts me in mind of Umberto Eco:

I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. … Therefore, those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Eco sees this as a means of selecting his readers—the ones who cannot be bothered to slog through the beginning section, he does not want—but I think there’s another way to understand it: by forcing the reader to work at the text, he must engage with it. The connection does not just select the reader, it reshapes him around the text.

Simplicity, legibility, and clarity are virtues, certainly—but they can also be obstacles. Complexity and obfuscation are not the enemy of communication.