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Chuck Martin reports: <<As someone pointed out, underlined used to be used
when we used mechanical machines that could not provide other means of
emphasis. (And how many of us tried to create bold text on a typewriter by
typing the same characters several times to keep adding ink to each
character?)>>
Yup, and isn't that a blast from the past! Personally, I used to emphasize
my important words with white-out or other liquid paper. Not intentionally,
mind you... <g>
<<There is another important issue here: people read by comprehending word
shapes. (This is why all caps is also a Bad Thing.) Cognitively, when you
read, you're actually scanning. And you're also moving your eyes to descrete
spots on the page. (I forget what those stopping points are called; I'm
almaost tempted to call up my old instructor, Tom Williams, because he would
know this right off the top of his head...)>>
They're called "saccades", from the French for "twitch or jerk"--referring
to the jerky movement of the eyes, not the reader <g>. And this,
incidentally, is why adequate word spacing is so important: spaces between
words help the eyes figure out (literally, "at a glance') how far to move to
the end of the current word, at which point the brain gets the message "time
to figure out what those blobs of ink mean before moving to the next word".
<<Anyway, we don't read the letters in the words. We see the shapes of the
words. The word shapes help up "see" the word. If you add underlining, you
destroy a lot of the word shape, especially any descenders, makin reading
more difficult.>>
Picking nits, but we don't read the letters _when the word is familiar to
us_; when it's unfamiliar, we have to pick it apart syllable by syllable
until it sparks a memory. (Not coincidentally, this is why most North
American readers have difficulty reading large blocks of sans serif text
quickly; most Europeans, who are more familiar with sans serif typesetting,
don't have the same problem we do. It's also why "script" fonts are such
problems in text: they're unfamiliar to us, and conceal the shapes of the
words.) Pay attention to how you're reading some day when you're tired and
misread a word, and you'll probably recognize that the shape of the correct
word is fairly similar to that of the word you substituted in its place. A
really skilled writer often knows exactly what word to choose to cue you for
the next word (because the two words go together so often that you complete
the phrase even before reading that second word), and when the author
doesn't follow up that cue, you misread the following word and have to
backtrack in a cloud of burnt rubber and tangled mental imagery. Mangling
cliches is a fun literary technique that takes advantage of this.
<<An interesting side note, if you take a word and trace its outline, then
show that outline to someone, often the word can be recognized. Such is the
importantce of word shape.>>
And the importance of letter shape can be seen by noting that you can often
read the lower half of a word even with the upper half obscured, but it's
more difficult to read the word from the upper half alone. (Of course, that
could be because all you see is the ascenders of the letters. <g> But the
point does apply really well if you obscure the bottom half of a word typed
in all-caps with the same word typed in lower-case.)
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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