WTF! (…What the font!)
Now they just have a few thousand more they need to test out.

what kind of correlation are we talking?

It might be because we are more used to reading Times New Roman, and will be able to concentrate on the subject matter more than with a font we are less familiar with.

I’m thinking that the addition of serifs adds an air of formality to the writing. Since they focused on satirical writings, I think that a serif font has a more educated look, and would therefore present itself more as the biting commentary of a member of the intelligentsia as opposed to Joe Lunchbox’s hand-scrawled rantings.

Great! More T.N.R. everywhere… ugh. Heck, even a digital LED font is far less annoying.

I notice that the headline here is a sans serif font, and the article is a serif, and I’m getting the opposite correlation here.

Presumably this work was done using text printed on standard office-type paper. It would be interesting to know whether the same results would obtain if the pieces of text were printed on a coated art paper – where the sans serif face would be more readable, and if they were read on a screen – where again you would expect the sans face to be more readable.

TNR is more difficult to read and thus increases stress while reading, thus increasing the emotional response. At least, that is my guess.

Graphic designers have known this since the advent of fonts… But I guess now we have science to back it up.

I don’t like Arial but I will use it. However, I detest Times New Roman.

Courier New is my preferred font, and not because it’s monospaced. I grew up with typewriters and like the look. To me, there’s a warmth in the font, almost as if the writer is speaking personally to the reader, similar to the way typed and handwritten letters used to be – even if it’s viewed on a screen.

“Modern” fonts appear to me to be less personal and less friendly.

I heard that Century Gothic is the font to use if the goal is to save printer ink: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125639616

Century Gothic saves ink because the letters are so narrow, and so packed together, that they’re annoying to read.

P Smith – I *dislike* Courier New for the exact same reason you seem to like it; I’d like to have a monospace font that looks like typewriter font, but it doesn’t look like that. The serifs are way too big, for one thing.

Serifs serve a useful purpose in dense text: they guide the eye along each line. Sans-serif fonts tend to be better where small, readable type is needed, as in ingredient lists on food labels, and where type is at low resolution, as on PowerPoint slides. In PowerPoint, some strokes in Times New Roman can be lost unless the lettering is quite large, whereas Helvetica/Arial doesn’t have that problem even when the text is improperly small.

hahaha… I completely understand how the socially-formalized Times New Roman makes a satirical writing seem more, well, satirical: it’s like imagining a really geeky university professor standing on a stage and cracking jokes at the illogical stupidity of other people – especially if his logic is not the kind that requires a Ph.D.

Arial makes me kinda nutty, but for those times when I want an easily-read, narrow font, I definitely like Arial Narrow. It squeezes into tiny spaces, like charts, graphs, and handmade visuals without the overlapping that often happens when you simply adjust the character spacing options.

To blog title-r: what’s wrong with Comic Sans? I know that it’s very kiddy, but like most fonts, there’s a practical application. I’m an ESL teacher in Japan and I work with elementary and Jr. high students. I really like Comic Sans because it imitates penmanship (compare to the Times New Roman ‘a’ or ‘g’). Still, I would never use it for a dissertation (unless I really wanted to insult my professor’s intelligence!).

I like TNR quite a bit, but not as much as some fonts. I have a fondness for old books and so faces like TNR, Bookman Antiqua, Georgia and Palatino appeal to me. I’m not fond of Arial, except for Arial Narrow – which is just too useful for squeezing into tight places. Arial seems like a poor mans Helvetica. To me Helvetica is the King of Sans Serif!

Why did they have to compare the worst representatives of both font genres? And why was the study limited to just one genre of text: satire? How could we deduce from this whether serifs make text funnier or whether they make they the original intent come across?

Times New Roman (or indeed, serif fonts in general) are easier to read when any larger amount of text is involved. As a commenter above mentions, the function of the serifs is to create a guiding line for the eyes.
Sans-serif fonts can be quite a bit better when single lines of text are being shown, or small text amounts. As soon as you go above two lines (and even more so if the lines are also wide) then a serif font is the way to go.

So the hypothesis that the increased strength of the satire might be because people could focus more on the content of the text instead of trying to follow the text is quite possible. As is the “TNR is more formal, giving the satire more authenticity” idea.

I would say that further study is required of the phenomenon to ascertain WHY those results arose.

As for the “I hate that font” debate.. use a good font for the purpose. TNR is good for printed text, Georgia (also a serif font) performs better for on-screen reading (width is not an issue, backlighting) while TNR is good for getting more text on each line (ok, not a lot). Sans-serif fonts (like Arial and Helvetica) are good for headings, image text, signs, logos, etc. Not for your term paper, research proposal, CV, or longer professional communications.

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