When I was going my PGCE I was taught that when writing on the board to use separated characters rather than joined up writing to aid readability.
Disclaimers
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References
- BPscript font - www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/bpscript .
- Grand Hotel font - www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/grand-hotel .
- Sofia font - www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/sofia .
An example
I’ve modified a theme of mine to serve and use the ‘BPscript, Grand Hotel and Sofia’ fonts (please see references) then used the CSS ‘letter-spacing: 0.125em’ to separate the characters so that what was once joined up text is no more:
Analysis
To me, looking at the text, it seems that ‘BPscript’ is more readable without the spacing and ‘Grand Hotel’ and ‘Sofia’ with.
This then leads to the thoughts ‘How do I understand what I see?’ and ‘What is going on and how does this affect my learning?’. With the former, I imagine that its how my mind processes imagery and identifies elements within the overall picture, breaking them down into objects that I know, like specific characters. The characters along with the lack of characters, spaces, to form other objects, words. With the latter, these words have meaning to me, and when combined form an even larger thought. The speed of how that thought is formed and then connected to other known memories must surely be a factor in how fast I can learn new concepts? Because the initial ’low level’ processing is clearly faster when you don’t have to concentrate as much at understanding the characters.
I do remember at the time not even questioning ‘why’ my written characters needed to be separated. In fact:
What do you think? Which is better?
Conclusion
Readability perhaps says just as much about the communicated as the communicator. We are all different and what works well for one person is not so effective for another. It is perhaps what works well for the majority that is the solution when excessive differentiation causes confusion.