As someone who has produced hundreds of pages of formal writing over my four years in college, you’d think that I would have experimented with fonts or formatting. Nope.
I have been devoted to Times New Roman 12 pt. font for as long as I can remember. I am tinged with annoyance whenever I go to type a paper and the set font is Cambria or Arial or Helvetica – like, why? I am a firm believer that academic writing should be in a serif font, like TNR, and a lot of others agree with me.
So, why do I (and the MLA and many professors and those who read our resumes) prefer a formal document written in a serif font?
I’m going to take a stab at this and you guys can tell me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with our brains’ natural inclination to detect patterns and order. Serif fonts give the illusion that words are being typed within a top and bottom line
__________
__________
and visually, we prefer this. It makes it easier to read because our eyes can follow the lines and we can easily identify separate letters. The letters are more bold and defined because they have end markers.
