Typography turned upside down

Conventional wisdom says that you should pay careful attention to typography so as to make your briefs more readable.  The idea is that a typographically more readable brief is more likely to be convincing to the court.

I first wrote about this topic in a 1997 seminar paper, which you can read by clicking here.  There is also a very good book on this topic, published in 2010.  The book is "Typography for Lawyers," by Matthew Broderick (published by Jones McClure Publishing).

Now, to my dismay, I have learned something that may turn the conventional wisdom upside down.  In the March 25, 2012 edition of the Dallas Morning News, I saw an article entitled "Hard-to-read fonts may aid recall."  The article discusses some studies by psychology professor Daniel Oppenheimer.   The studies suggest that using a hard-to-read font may actually improve comprehension and recall.  Oppenheimer concludes that encountering a "disfluency" (such as a difficult font) makes the reader "concentrate harder and process the material more deeply."  

Oppenheimer does not suggest using difficult fonts in magazines, where the idea is to entice mass-market buyers with easy-to-read fluff.  But where the writing is intended to educate the reader, making the reading a little harder may actually be better.  Oppenheimer suggests Monotype Corsiva as a difficult font that scores very high in his studies of readers' ability to recall the material. 

Wow, this could be a stunning discovery  --  that you should use a difficult font that creates enough "disfluency" to increase the court's comprehension.  I'm skeptical, but would like to know more about this potential game changer. 

What next?  Should we assemble the pages upside down to make the court work harder, thereby increasing comprehension?

--  Scott Stolley, Thompson & Knight 

Comments

[Emil Kiehne]

I wouldn't make my briefs harder to read, even if this study is correct. Appellate and other judges have a lot of reading to do, and making their job harder does not seem like a wise tactic, especially if my brief is the last one the judge is reading at the end of a long day.

[Bob Powell]

I would advise my opponents to heed Oppenheimer's advice. I personally will strive for the easy read that encourages my reader to join me in exploring the issue for our mutual benefit.

Bob

[Stephen R. Diamond]

Put in the whole research context, the finding is that a certain level of cognitive disfluency can help rather than hurt. Simpler isn't always better. (http://tinyurl.com/3e9fqcs) But cognitive disfluency can be introduced by means other than illegible typography, and most legal writing, moreover, is already too disfluent.