This typeface called “Sans Forgetica” is precisely what it sounds like: too good to be true. In counter-experiments, it turned out there were no differences in retention rate in comparison to familiar typefaces like Arial, Times New Roman, or Garamond (you’re currently reading Classic Serif, by the way). In fact, participants were less good at picking up on errors while proofreading a Sans Forgetica text.
Sans Forgetica plays on the naming of typefaces: sans is French for “without”, and refers to styles like Comic Sans, that is, sans serif or without serifs. Serifs are the little projections at the end of some letters in some typefaces, giving them classy, elegant, and decorative looks. Sans serif can look goofy (like Comic Sans) but also sober and neutral like Helvetica. Let’s say, sans serif typefaces get the job done, but aren’t exactly what you want to take out for a fancy dinner.
Where serifs and sans serifs came from is a whole different post. It seems we read serif typefaces like Times New Roman better when we encounter a text on paper, and sans serifs like Helvetica when reading on a digital device. However, as I described in a previous post, there’s much more coming into play with typefaces than “mere” biology or anything that can easily be tested. We have personal associations and emotions attached to typefaces, we might be especially used to a particular one and can process it faster, and there’s also the spacing of letters in relation to each other, and letter elements in relation to themselves (called “kerning”) which a designer can manipulate for greater or lesser readability.
This post was not supposed to be on the history of typefaces, but on the motivation behind an invention like Sans Forgetica: the way we read apparently isn’t okay. It’s not enough. It’s not fast enough, efficient enough, and we need to improve it and make it more productive for our competitive capitalist world.
So, we recruit the stuff that reading’s made of: the shape of letters, how we encounter them, our biology. Punctuation. Luckily, none of this is working. Reading the way it is is at good as it’ll ever be. So, I say: leave reading alone! Here’s a brief over-view of those misguided attempts to improve on what’s already perfect.
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Speed-reading gurus promise amazing results for reading more in less time if you suppress the voice in your head while reading silently. But what does that actually mean? When you’re reading this post, you’re probably on your phone, perhaps on the bus, or eating, and scrolling through you emails. Whatever it is, and wherever you are, chances are you’ll be reading silently, just through the movement of your eyes, without reading out loud, without so much as the slightest movement of your lips. The vast majority of reading done by adults today is silent reading. Yet, it’s not always been so. Or at least, we think it’s not been so.
It’s strange to realise that for something we do so casually, and something so wide-spread as reading, we actually don’t know a lot about it, historically-speaking. We have records picking out when someone read silently, for example: the famous fourth-century church father and philosopher Saint Augustine one day walked in on Bishop Ambrose of Milan, reading in his cell. Without voice! Shocking! Augustine writes:
When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present - for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced - I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise.
Augustine is confused, and speculates what might be behind brother Ambrose’s incredible feat: perhaps he wanted to preserve his voice from becoming hoarse from all this reading; perhaps he planned to forestall having to explain a passage to any curious passer-by if he read out loud. Whatever the most likely reason was for Augustine, it’s clear that reading silently was the exception rather than the norm.
There are a handful of examples from history’s stars like Caesar and Alexander the Great who would read silently when the text was confidential, making clear that people usually read out loud even when they were on their own. It’s probably only since the eighth century that people have started to read silently like we do today. But don’t be fooled: our voices may be silent, but we’re still reading out loud. We subvocalise. And that’s what speed-readers hate.
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Subvocalisation is the voice in our mind while reading. The vast majority of people has it, although we often don’t notice. Speed readers assume it’s precisely this mental mouthing that slows down reading, because reading a text out loud takes longer than reading it silently, but if you read with a voice in your head still going to the lengths of formulating words, you’re losing time. So, speed-readers teach tricks on how to supress this voice, and it’s true that it’s possible to tune the volume of our mental voice down. But for any gain in milliseconds, we lose in comprehension of text and memory retention.
It turns out that even though we’re not actually emitting any voice, our larynx moves imperceptibly while reading. The muscle movement of the vocal chords is so tiny that we don’t notice it consciously, but the electric impulse can be registered by a computer. In fact, NASA has trained a processor to pick up different electric impulse pattern, effectively creating a mind-reading machine! And it’s this muscle movement that aids understanding the meaning of a text, and remembering it, though we don’t exactly know why. So, we have the choice to read a text a fraction more quickly, but not get what we’re reading and not remember it - or to read as we have always done and not stress about suppressing any automatic biological response that’s even beneficial. I know what I’d pick!
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If internal voice suppression isn’t working, then maybe doing something to the eyes will?
Our experience of reading is smooth. We have the impression our eyes glide along words (or anything out there in the world), forever going forward, sending a series of pictures to the brain. But that’s not how seeing or reading works. Reading is a bit of a convoluted, seemingly erratic jumping forward and sometimes back.
When we look at one spot, we have clear vision in the centre, and then slowly lose accuracy the further we go. Things become pretty fuzzy in our peripheral vision left and right. But rather than marching forward from point to point, nature found it more economical to have the eye rest on one spot, taking in what’s left and right, then jump ahead to the next resting place, again absorbing what’s in its immediatey vicinity.
The resting point is called “fixation”, the jumping “saccade”. As you can see, there’s lots of jumping going on within one short sentence. The eye even hops back and re-reads, but we’ll come to that below.
As the sentence shows, our eyes don’t fixate on all words equally. They tend to rest on content words (such as “knight”) but skip functional words (such as “the”). That’s pretty smart, and relieves the brain from actively spending energy on processing words that can be inferred, that don’t transfer the most important meaning.
Now, speed-readers thought to themselves “awesome! Let’s eliminate the jumping, and have the eye stay stuck on one place like a camera, merely taking up the image of the letters and sending it to the brain like the channel it is. None of this nonsensical time-wasting gymnaestics!”
Speed-readers feed text into a tachistoscope, a device to give the eye one flashing image at a time, or (in the case of reading) one word after the other, so that it does not have to move. Check out this tachistoscope text in action:
Frankly, I find this stressful and counter-productive. And that’s precisely what it turns out to be: the eye now treats all words as equally important, forcing the brain to do too much heavy-lifting. Through the interminable onslaught of flashing words, the eye can’t regress, and re-read, and this impacts the level of comprehension and remembering of the actual meaning of what has been thus “read”. And because scientists don’t know when exactly the eye will regress (they only know that it does), the computer can’t calculate when our eye might like the tachistoscope to show a word again. We arrive at the exact same result as with suppressing our internal voice: it’s useless.
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And because human beings don’t learn from what’s been amply shown, along comes the latest fad, promising to overhaul our reading experience: “bionic” reading.
Bionic reading” by a Swiss designer pair proposes to helps people with ADHD and dyslexia by randomly highlighting syllables in bold. Supposedly working alongside our visual biology this time, the company alleges it makes reading easier by marking fixation points, so that the eyes’ jumping can occur faster and with less energy investment.
Oh, and you can buy different features for ten dollars a month, of course. Try it out for free here (you can choose how many letters you want highlighted).
The problem is, though, that readers themselves can choose how many and which syllables to turn to bold, tending to mark up initial syllables. But we don’t choose where our eyes want to rest. They just rest! And that’s A Good Thing! Imagine how exhausting it would be to have to consciously select rest and movement during reading.
There haven’t been formalised linguistic studies refuting bionic reading, but enraged researchers have done their own experiments, and found it to have zero impact on reading time or experience. When I reached out to the designers for an interview, I got no reply. Predictably.
Something about bionic reading makes me more furious than about any other reading “improvement” method. I think it’s because it’s peddling to people with ADHD and dyslexia, so people who are struggling as is, not high-flying nerds who want to beat the clock through reading more faster. Struggling people just want to read with more focus and ease. But what bionic reading is selling them is a lie without any foundation in facts. And that rubs me off the wrong way.
Why do we keep inventing devices and strategies to speed up reading? Why do we succumb to the ever-beckoning siren-call of productivity, attempting to force our biology into a direction that turns out counter-productive?
Reading, it transpires, is a human activity we’ve been honing for thousands of years. 5000 years, in fact. It’s as good now as it will ever get, which is why, perhaps, we’ve stopped inventing new punctuation marks and new designs of text after 1600. Reading is perfect the way it is, and it takes the time it takes. Our task is not so much to make it bigger, better, faster (we can’t even). It’s just to keep on doing it.