Forrest,

You are right, we (or better to say: myself) might have mentioned that Kevin

Peter Enneson's essay is brilliant.

Everything I have always wanted to say about the subject (but could never do so half as well).

The brightness contrast of some of the text on color backgrounds surprises me for an issue on readability. The first page of Hrant's article's black on dark ochre is tough enough but the green-on-green of Enneson's article was really disruptive even for such a well written piece. The Dyson article used a raster pattern about half way down the page making that portion of text all but unreadable to me.
All-in-all it is a great issue for content and I commend TYPO for such a wonderful editorial interplay of ideas.
It makes me wonder if they were pushing the boundaries of readability with color and pattern on purpose just to see how far they could go before someone said "ouch."

ChrisL

Chris, after reading text on the IntarWEB for the last 10 years, I'm grateful when the letterforms are legible. I honestly didn't even notice the color contrasts (or lack thereof) when I was reading. It all seemed perfectly readable to me!

And Pavel, no apologies are necessary; Keith's paper deserves wider distribution and it gives Hrant something to work against. The only reason I was bummed was because there wasn't more new TYPO for me to read!

Am I the only person who finds reading white on black screen text easier than black on white? It would probably be different if I weren't using a CRT monitor, but solid white seems to hurts my eyes.

Black on off-white seems to be best. Not sure if this would be true for ClearType rendering on an LCD.

http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/text.htm

>> As for color, as long as there is sufficient contrast between the text and the background, many color combinations are possible. However, most studies have shown that dark characters on a light background are superior to light characters on a dark background (when the refresh rate is fairly high). For example, Bauer and Cavonius (1980) found that participants were 26% more accurate in reading text when they read it with dark characters on a light background. Moreover, a survey by Scharff, et al. (1996) revealed that the color combination perceived as being most readable is the traditional black text on white background. However, it is common for websites (such as this one) to have an off-white background in order to reduce the flicker and glare associated with white backgrounds. <<

I was reading the actual offset press printed magazine, not the PDF on screen and my 61 year old eyes could not finish an article at a sitting. I was very interested in the subject matter so I persisted and read it in several sessions.

>solid white seems to hurts my eyes.

Try turning down the brightness, especially on LCD.

My monitor is a CRT and it is adjusted fairly dim. I guess white doesn't really hurt my eyes, but it is more difficult to look at.

I just feel like the pure white background (made by additive light) are much more taxing to read upon than a black background. I've had a number of conversations about it now and I think it's weird that I can't find anyone sympathetic. For a while I thought it might be because my first 5 years on a computer were spent entirely in DOS with a black background.

I'm completely comfortable with being wrong on the subject, but I think there is more to it than that. Oh well. I hope the issue will go away as soon as I can afford a flat panel.

I've read all three articles, or rather did my first run- through.

Forrest wrote: "His language is occasionally arcane" in regards to Peter Enneson's article. I found it rather dense, and strewn with vocabulary that will deter many. I much prefer Kevin Larson's clear, expository style among the three. I was hoping to refer working, less-academically inclined, designers to the issue, but now I've got serious reservations. I'm not looking for a predigested or dumbed-down version, but in all fairness, a less erudite and more straightforward discussion by Enneson would help draw attention to the substantive issues here.

Speaking as a working designer, not academically inclined (and not inclined to the computer lab either), I think Peter Enneson's article is bang on. Yes, it's difficult, and some of his paragraphs have to be read several times, but this is a complex subject, and the humanist, intellectual approach does it more justice than the grandiose, simplistic notion of "The Science of Word Recognition" (Lorne Greene voice).

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some easy science that we could learn about reading, so that we could be better type designers and typographers? No, because once it's reduced to easy science, the job will be automated.

I'm not quite certain how to 'solve' the compact and perhaps somewhat distended expository style of my Typo 13 contribution except to say that, in the context of Hrant's somewhat cavalier or opportunistic approach to questions of evidence, and Kevin's failure to address matters of construct validity, I thought it necessary to develop the kind of text I did. I've asked Pavel if it might be possible to provide and English-language translation of the Czech-language summary supplied by David Barton. Some of my more arcane usages have to do with my sense that the typographical craft-evolved terminological repertoire might not be adequate to the task of articulating a typographically relevant evidence-based understanding of reading.

Another solution might be to turn my contribution into a much larger text, but at the moment my construction of reading is still too exploratory and my command of the relevant literature still too fragmentary to make that possible. My text as it stands represents a, for me, foundational document on which, I hope, I and others can build. But a larger text might be even less approachable for the graphic design student who wants an overview of the issues more than a detailed elaboration and justification of points of view.

In terms of substantive issues, let me offer the following: contra Kevin, I argue that the parallel letter recognition model of word recognition is neither sustainable in broadly cognitive-scientific terms nor convenient for gauging and channeling typographic practice; against Hrant I argue that the importance of internal features discrimination to the wordform (or in Hrant's terms: bouma) resolution mechanisms underlying immersive reading does not warrant a parafoveally skewed understanding of reading of the kind Hrant puts forward, and hence motivates a somewhat different understanding than his of what counts in typographic practice.

I also wanted to convey that the key relevant issues for typographic practice are 'perceptual processing' issues and that the benefit of addressing such issues at a fairly sophisticated level lies not in telling us in specifics what to do, but in identifying and orienting us toward what's important in typographic formgiving and typeform construction. (For example, one consequence of my outlook is to suggest that when using or designing a sans-serif font, inter- and intra-letter spacing--managing the white of the word--are more critical than they perhaps might be in old-style seriffed fonts.)

>against Hrant I argue that the importance of internal features discrimination to the wordform (or in Hrant's terms: bouma) resolution mechanisms underlying immersive reading does not warrant a parafoveally skewed understanding of reading of the kind Hrant puts forward, and hence motivates a somewhat different understanding than his of what counts in typographic practice.

Mr. Enneson, in my opinion this, and much in your essay, is bad writing--correction, terrible writing. There is no call for it in your subject matter. All you want to say, you can say with direct, clear language.

Joseph M. Williams, in his admirable book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace characterizes the way you are writing here as 'useless nominalization.'

Here is a comparative example from Williams:

"1a. Because we knew nothing about local conditions, we could not determine how effectively the committee had allocated funds to areas that most needed assistance.

"1b. Our lack of knowledge about local conditions precluded determination of committee action effectiveness in fund allocation to those areas in greatest need of assistance."

These say exactly the same thing. The first is readable, if a bit complex. The second is a puzzle that you have to unscramble. Your essay follows the second style, to the extreme.

I hope that when you write further on these subjects, you follow Williams' good counsel.

William, I could have said (had I taken more time and had I had less of a concern with putting the whole of my concerns into one comprehensive sentence):
In Hrant's understanding of reading parafoveal processing does the bulk of the work. Converging lines of evidence suggest that an understanding of reading such as this is not sustainable. The lines of evidence I have in mind relate to: 1) the role actually played in recognition by internal features of boumas; 2) the parafovea's inability to discriminate internal features effectively in bouma-sized contexts; and 3) recent denominations of the parafoveal preview benefit. This motivates a somewhat different understanding than his of what counts in typographic practice.

Or simply: studies show Hrant's understanding of reading is not sustainable.

I am not convinced I am guilty of 'useless nominalization'. 'Nominalization,' perhaps; 'useless,' I want to think, not. But, having said that, I am bothered by my lack of ability to communicate effectively to a sizable portion of the typographical community (of which I am a part) things I think need to be addressed; or to put it differently, I am disturbed by my ability to obscure what I think needs saying by provoking negative reactions to how I say it, or how I think it is best formulated. I hope readers will bear with me.

This was a double post of the previous entry--my apologies. Can it be deleted?

> In Hrant's understanding of reading parafoveal
> processing does the bulk of the work.

Real quick:
The most I've ever thought the parafovea (or really, more generally and significantly, multi-letter boumas) contributes is about 2/3-rds. But since Kevin's arrival I've downgraded that. However, I still think it's more than half. But anyway, really, the important thing isn't how much it contributes, but that it exists (something the LP model refutes entirely). I'm sorry if this is all too fuzzy to build an empire on, but please don't shoot the messenger.

More in time.

hhp

Peter, I am primarily a writer, and recently a typogrographer. I write on difficult subjects, and labor very long and hard to make myself understood. I hope you understand that it is because I think you have something to say that I was so brutally blunt. And I appreciate your gracious reply.

You show by your re-write that you are perfectly capable of putting in the labor on clear writing and getting a far better result.

You say that you are bothered by your difficulty in making yourself understood to typographers. Writing experts, in particular Mr. Williams, have spent their careers trying to identify precisely what makes writing more and less readable. I would suggest that their study and expertise should be taken as seriously as studies on what make type physically readable.

If you are concerned to communicate effectively, I would invite you to study Mr. Williams' book and judge for yourself whether his standards are good, and whether your nominalizations are useless or not. Mr. Williams discusses the difference between useful and useless nominalizations at length.

My own prediction is that if you try to follow his recommendations you will find yourself phenomenally better understood. I find that they do require a lot of work, but always get a better result.

Finally, on Yves' aphorism. I think it also works the other way around. When you try to make yourself clear by standards of good rhetoric, it helps you to clarify your own ideas. So the benefits is double: to you and to the reader.

To start with, you will find that the goal of putting everything into one sentence is a prescription for writing disaster.

Best of luck on this other, critical dimension of readability!

> useful and useless

The fatal flaw in this -which I see paralleled in the blind lust for totally pinning down reading among some people- is that different people find different things "useful". Peter's writing is not useless simply because it's difficult. Not everything that needs to be said can be said succinctly. Look at the most compelling examples of world literature - much of it would be gobbledygook by this standard. But it's not - humans love it, cherish it, benefit from it. You might say this is a technical subject that can't have a useful "existentialim". I would counter that this stance is cozy escapism, that everything a human can and does talk about has all the dimensions in it to some extent. There is a place in this dialog for all kinds of methods of expression, far beyond what can supposedly be "expositioned" in labs, especially since we're currently unable -and I feel will be unable for the forseeable future- to fully understand reading. You don't marry somebody you fully know.

BTW, I think you misunderstood Yves (unless I have). But of him I would ask: Et que doit on faire au sujet des choses qui ne se con

>Peter's writing is not useless simply because it's difficult

Hrant, I didn't say Peter's writing is useless.

I said Peter wrote with useless nominalization. In Williams' view a nominalization is useless when it does not help the writer express clearly what he or she wants to say. Instead it usually puts an obstacle in the reader's way.

Peter's was the only article in the magazine that I read in full. But then, I am a junkie for big words.

> In Williams' view a nominalization is useless when ....

To me this is exactly the sort of formalistic compartmentalization that precludes about half of humanly useful communication.

> Peter's was the only article in the magazine that I read in full.

For those who have already made up their minds (like Forrest too), that's certainly a smart time-saver. The important thing is the heady euphony of it all, of course - nevermind the content. Nevermind that Peter and I are much close than either of us to Kevin, but some people still gayly choose to favor the style of one and the implications of another, but of course not either enough to do something about it.

--

It's the hybrid mongrel, the fuzzy stuff in the middle that's most useful, as flightly and stinky as it is. This is what started to be lost about two thousand years ago, and has now become an inconvenient ghost of a memory for mankind.

hhp

For those who have already made up their minds (like Forrest too), that's certainly a smart time-saver. The important thing is the heady euphony of it all, of course - nevermind the content.

Hey now, I read all three articles

What's woolly? It seems to me that you're dismissing what you can't put in a box. The old "what can't be counted doesn't count". Is the entire corpus of anecdotal evidence woolly? Is my pointing out that the PL model can't properly explain very long saccades, regressions and typos woolly? Your own admission that we don't really know what's going on should make you more open to delve deeper, to wonder, to doubt - to avoid the succubus of the Easy Answer.

And you can think about and discuss style, or what kind of tea you like (I like Lapsang Souchong, and I'm OK with the fact that it makes most people nauseous), but don't let that cloud the evaluation of the content. None of the stuff in Typo13 is bullshit. It's all what each of us is thinking, inescapably to some extent feeling. Humans do this.

hhp

I'm not eager to draw out discussion of my rhetorical strategies (or those of others) to the point where discussion of the issues, and their meaning for practice is indefinitely postponed. But let me add, William, that I'm not entirely convinced that texts like the one I prepared for publication don't have a value and a place. In preparing the text I was well aware of the demands it would place upon the reader. Not only the typographically trained reader, but also the cognitive-scientifically schooled researcher. I was also well aware that not every reader would be willing to expend the amount of effort that might be required to make sense of it, and I was thrilled to note several did. I felt that what would make the text difficult going had more to do with the fairly large amount of unfamiliar expressions, rather than the oddities of construction and syntax. I hoped that the unfamiliar expressions might be transparent enough to allow a level of understanding and not require too much explanation. At one point Pavel and I suggested the possibility of a glossary of terms. So in writing the text I was taking a calculated risk and consciously engaging in a kind of experiment. I thought that what I lost in accessibility, I could gain in precision. Precision, Hrant, about the fuzzy stuff. Precision, not heady euphony.

The type of expository prose you argue for, William, has its benefits, and were I or anyone else to attempt a full, widely accessible presentation of my understanding of perceptual processing in reading, I (or that person) would need to subject myself to the disciplines Williams, and others like him, outline. I hope you will believe me that I am not unaware of these disciplines. But at the time of their preparation, the text in place, and the presentation on which it was based, was what I could manage. The kind of writing it embodies had its own demands.

(Meanwhile, I wonder if Williams means something different with his term 'nominalization' than my dictionary suggests: converting (another part of speech) into a noun.)

I feel it is misleading to suggest, Hrant, that you and I are much closer than either of us to Kevin. There are common themes in your and mine approaches, and I owe a lot to conversations with you in consolidating my own point of view, but as Kevin has stated in off-forum conversations there is much that he and I can agree on. I hope we can get to testing and exploring those areas of agreement and difference eventually with the goal of a convergence of perspectives between the three of us.

>converting (another part of speech) into a noun.

Yes, he uses this grammatical term in its normal meaning.

>I hope you will believe me that I am not unaware of these disciplines.

I don't believe you, sorry. If you knew and understood Williams you wouldn't pile on the stuff he says characterizes bad writing. --such as "not unaware". Try "aware".

William, i'm astonished by the paternalism of your post. While you may be right

> Precision, not heady euphony.

1) I think it's a precision borne of depth, not accuracy. I might not use the term "precision" here.
2) As I've expressed before (although maybe not in public, at least not explicitly) I think your essay is what it needs to be, especially in the "tonal spectrum" of the whole of Typo13. A topic like this can leverage much spirit from what I've been calling this "existential" style. My complaint above stemmed from Nick's apparent preference of style over content, the admiration of the waves on the surface of the ocean instead of the ecosystem within it.

> there is much that he and I can agree on.

Sure. But these are things I would most probably agree with as well! Things like the limits of familiarity, the importance of empiricism, etc. In the triangle formed by our three views, my vertex is quite close to the line between you and Kevin, and closer to your vertex than his. Exactly what do you and Kevin agree on that I don't? The only thing I can think of is perhaps a belief that we can one day have a total grasp of reading (which I have a philosophical problem with) and by extension that it's possible to design type -optimally readable type- in a sound, formal, complete state of mind. This is in fact the crux of the monotheistic/Roman/Western belief system that I was complaining about above; something I myself used to subscribe to in my teens, but no longer.

BTW, I'm not trying to pit you two against each other; I'm all for the covergence -or at least mutual illumination- that you describe; but I can't pretend the triangle is equilateral.

--

> If you knew and understood Williams ....

There's a huge difference between understanding and accepting; it's often hard to do the former, but the latter is a matter of integrity, not ability. I think you're being entirely too dogmatic, even theological.

hhp

What follows is the result of my attempt to translate the formal, precise style of Peter's 8:26 post into the sort of informal, more conversational language more typical of an online forum posting. I apologize in advance to any changes in meaning. Anyway:

I don't want to talk about my writing style so much that gets in the
way of what I'm trying to say, but I think sometimes there's a need
for formal, precise writing. When I wrote my article I knew it
wouldn't be easy reading for most typographers (and even cognitive
scientists), and that a lot of people would be turned off by the fancy
style. Happily, several people did manage to slog through it. I think
the technical jargon was a bigger problem than the way I put sentences
together. I hoped that people would be able to understand the jargon
from context, but even so Pavel and I did think about doing a glossary
explaining the unfamiliar terms. I took a chance in writing so
formally, and we'll see whether that was a good idea. In any case, one
reason I write so formally is that it's easier to be precise in
talking about fuzzy stuff. Not just for the sound of it, Hrant.

William asked for clear, plain writing, and that's a good goal, and if
I were trying to communicate to more people I would hunker down and
make my writing simpler. Believe me, I know how to write clearly, but
I find it difficult. The article I wrote was the best I could do at
the time.

(By the way, I have a hunch that the "nominalization" of the Williams
book is a different animal than the usual linguistics meaning: making
other kinds of words into nouns)

I don't agree, Hrant, that you and I are closer together than we are
to Kevin. We share some themes, and I really appreciate the
conversations we've had, but there's also a lot that Kevin and I agree
on. I hope we can keep testing and exploring the ideas, ideally so
that all three of us wind up on the same page.

I confess, I come from a scientific, empirical background. My mother is a research scientist (although before that, she was an artist. I picked up much of my early fascination with lettering and ornament from her) and my father is a lawyer. One of my best friends is a postgraduate researcher in molecular biology, and another is completing a PhD in (wait for it) artificial intelligence and visual recognition. I myself studied computer science in school, and have spent the last ten years working as a software engineer (which is something very different). It's possible I have a prejudice towards falsifiability and materialistic analysis of data rooted in quantifiable phenomena (although I'm not sure where "monotheism" is supposed to enter the picture).

At the same time, I'm a reader first and foremost. Thanks to an early exposure to critical theory, I'm comfortable with "difficult discourse", and I've come to see the value of inductive, intuitive reasoning as used by postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Any philosophy that restricts itself to the world of empirical data is not going to be a very useful philosophy, and there are few experiences more rewarding than the "aha" that comes with reasoning my way through a knotty bit of metaphysics and finally grasping it for myself.

Reading is both a physical process and an act of cognition. One is the domain of research, and the other of cognitive psychology and philosophy. I think that if we're going to talk about the readability of the *form* of a text (that is, its layout, typeface, and other formatting choices, independent of the words composing the text itself), we have to unbundle the overloaded word "reading". There is type, there is layout, and there is text. We recognize letter- and / or word-forms, we follow their flow across the page, and we process the text itself. These are all independent acts, some more mechanical than others.

Hrant, you clearly imply in your article that you value the notion of "readability" over "legibility". You seem to believe that research into legibility that fails to account for readability is compromised or even useless, but I'm unable to determine why you believe that readability subsumes legibility in such an overwhelming way. It seems to me that the research Kevin Larson summarizes (not synthesizes; his paper is clearly an effort to help typographers understand the state of play in cognitive research, rather than to advance any thesis of his own) is concerned with the mechanical aspects of reading and how they relate to legibility, and I don't really see where or how you undercut that research, except to dismiss legibility as unimportant next to readability. When you do try to attack things head-on, that's exactly where things start to get woolly.

For example, you say that undergraduate students may have less reading "ability" than post-graduate students, but I don't see this is relevant to the discussion of *how* people read. I have no doubt that I have the capacity to read much faster than I did ten years ago, but I doubt (although am unsure) that the mechanisms I use to pick words off the page have changed. The process by which I analyze those words has changed tremendously, but the mechanical act of reading is essentially the same for me now as it was 20 years ago, when I was starting high school.

You also claim to demonstrate that the PL model of word recognition is inadequate, but only by going far beyond the remit of the studies on which the model is based. What this suggests to me is that we need more data, so we can see if your intuitively-devised theories and the data we can gather will match. I don't think it's enough to say, "I'm sure the way I'm doing things is an improvement, because that's what my theory tells me." At least, that doesn't convince me that you're not selling me snake-oil or just plain deluded.

I keep chiming in on this thread because I want to know how type works. It's easy to say, for example, that serifs work by creating rails of horizontal stress in a text, but I feel uneasy taking that notion on faith. Typography is one of the last great guild professions; there are clearly masters, and yeomen, and apprentices, and there's a huge body of accumulated wisdom secreted away here and there in books. At least some of the conventional wisdom in any profession as old as typography and bookmaking is guaranteed to be false

>the intolerance in which you express your opinion which is only an opinion

Guillaume, my comment was not intolerant, but critical. The tone of it is dismissive of Peter's defense of his writing style. The tone should have been more gentle, but the rejection is thoroughly merited.

Writers, in my view, just as typographers, have a responsibility to their readers. The manner in which Peter wrote is just a model of the kind of turgid, prolix writing that Williams sets out to correct. Further, I find it ironic that in an essay on readibility Peter writes in a manner that needlessly requires the reader to re-read sentences many times just to puzzle out their meaning.

When I write on difficult topics I try to write as clearly as I can. Peter's defense that this style in this essay is more "precise" is unsound. Turgid prose is just harder to read, not more precise.

Where Williams writes of useless nominalization, Fowler, in his "Modern English Usage" writes of "abstractitis" --which is perhaps the best term for what Peter's essay has a terminal case of. Here is an example from Fowler: "'Participation by the men in the control of the industry is non-existent' instead of 'The men have no part in the control of industry.'"

The first edition of Fowler was in 1926, and Williams continues in this tradition with a deeper analysis of the same issues, and more help for those writers who want to correct such errors and make their writing more readable. My harsh rejection of Peter's writing style in the essay is not simply 'my opinion,' but the reflection of a widespread campaign for clear writing that has gone on for over seventy-five years, and has involved the life work of numerous researchers, writers and teachers.

I know very well that some Continental philosophers write with full blown 'abstractitis', and that it impresses many people as deep. Even Nick, a writer of admirably lucid prose, was impressed.

But in reality 'abstractitis' has no defense, except that the writer, regretably, had no time to make it better. The defense that this style, or should I say blunder, is more precise or deep is unsound, and is shown to be unsound in detail and in depth by such people as Fowler and Williams.

Before Forrest started this particular Typophile Forum, Kevin, Hrant and I discussed the possibility of a Typophile Forum on Typo 13. I was eager to see this happen, and one of the reasons was that I was eager to hear how William might respond to my contentions. I had come to understand that William had a philosophy of science background, was familiar with Hrant's contributions to the subject and had read Kevin's paper. I felt my contribution could move the discussion forward. I hoped that William could help sort through some of the misfiring in communication that the subject matter of the issue seems to attract and that he could help keep attention focused on what needs to happen to resolve the differences in interpretation.

In my Typo text I tried to articulate my perceptions as clearly as I could, given the Hrant (bouma), Kevin (parallel letter recognition model of word recognition), varied empirical studies context and I resorted to continental-philosophy-style rhetorical devices to do this. I don't fault Parmenides, Martin Heidegger and others like them for bending the resources of the language to convey what they believed needed to be brought across. They did what they thought needed doing. Reading them with the expectation of learning from them, or gauging the merit of what they have to contribute, implies a willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt, also in matters of expository style.
To the extent that the writer of a text has a responsibility toward the reader, the reader, who wishes to make sense of a particular text, has a responsibility toward the text. And that responsibility is to take the text on its own terms and become equal to the challenges it places before the him or her. Not everyone will want to make this effort. Many will rely on the judgment of others. If the reader thinks the same thing can be said in more expositorially 'correct' ways, without loss of information and reach, than he or she should make the effort.
I am not averse to pursuing such a challenge, or at least exploring, with others, the possibilities of restatement. But I do hope William will feel inclined to address specific claims.

> I do hope William will feel inclined to address specific claims.

I was completely put off by your writing to the point that I did not want to read it although I am quite interested in the subject matter and read (but didn't study) Kevin and Hrant's contributions. But I am now working through your essay, and will post when I have finished - which may take a while.

Peter, I am sorry for the intemperate tone of my post last evening, which as Guillaume pointed out detracts from my argument. The fact is, though, that Williams' work is rooted in linguistics, and is supported, I believe, by contemporary research in cognitive science.

For what it's worth, my view is that clarity or lack of clarity in writing is normally a much bigger factor in readability than is typeface and layout. Jenson and Griffo I think figured out how to make type more readable than the scribe's pen, and type ever since has been generally excellent in readability, with a few unfortunate detours.

William, now, i'm not astonished anymore, but i admire your confidence. That way you have to carry the truth and expose it to the poor ignorants that are enough dumb to have other opinions than your masters, is brilliant.

I mean, the fact a scientist you like, and others, claim something doesn't make it blessed truth. It makes it an opinion, informed and intelligent, argumented and build, but still an opinion. Let's say a thesis of you want. But i'm more than sure i can bring the same amount of scientists to say the contrary with admirable deepness.
More: the exemples you give are irrelevant, because in each case they use a easy sentence, while what Peter speak about are complicated things. I don't even want to argue about that precise topic, but there are tons of arguments to defend a difficult writting, if it's used to carry a complicated meaning.
Anyway, what disturb me isn't the thing itself, it's the arrogant way you don't even think it's worth talking about it.

>poor ignorants that are enough dumb to have other opinions than your masters

Guillaume, I get the feeling that whenever I contadict the views of your masters you cry 'arrogance'!

I have never met Williams, and he is only my master in that I have read his book and try to follow it. I do know that there is a long effort of research, writing and teaching on clear writing. I think that the arrogance is not on my part in recognizing their contribution and making an effort to learn from it.

I am extremely critical of those who ignore what seems to me well estabilished knowledge, confirmed by contemporary research, on what makes for good writing. Not least because it disrespects the reader and smacks of trying to do a 'snow job' on him or her. To me that is an arrogant style.

The examples that I quoted from Williams and Fowler are simple in order to communicate the principles clearly. If you stack up 'useless nominalizations,' unclear technical terms, useless qualifiers, double negatives, passive voice, run-on sentences, then you get needlessly difficult writing, such as in Peter's essay. Kevin and Hrant were writing about the same complex matters, but with clearer writing. (The quality of their arguments is another question.)

In my view, the obscurity of Parmenides and Heidigger are signs of problems in their ideas, not because what they have to say has to be said that way. But this is another story. Here we are in my opinion dealing not with philosophy, but with testable scientific research. State the theory clearly enough to test it, and then do the tests. That will make for progress.

From what i've read, William, your thesis isn't so "well estabilished knowledge, [and] confirmed by contemporary research". Many scientists write in a complicated way, for a simple reason : their audience know the words they use, and then there are no reasons not to use them (words, or specific expressions). Would you expect a doctor not to use the terms he learned when he speaks to peers but explain in detail and with everyone-understandable language sentences ? That's nonsense.
Then, there's indeed a fancy to speak complicated, that i've used myself, and that i've learned to reject as i'm going to be a journalist. But i know in some situation, and precisely experts ones, it's more useful than critiquable.

And William, i respect your (the other William) view on that. It's just the absolute way you express it that disturb me.

Guillaume, you misunderstand me. I am not speaking of or objecting to using clear technical terms to a readership that knows them. Neither I nor Williams and Fowler have any objection to this.

If you look at either of these authors you will see the kind of problems they diagnose and correct.

If you are going to be a journalist, I think you will find Williams helpful, though it depends on the sort of journalism. Williams is concerned with helping those who have to write as part of their work, doing reports, etc, on difficult matters. So the more complex the matters you have to write about, the more helpful Williams will be. (I think his stuff is almost all equally applicable to French language.)

Generally speaking I find that journalists write better than everyone else, perhaps because they have a lot of practice. The usual problem with journalism is not bad writing, but lack of depth.

Raph, that's cool. But could you make me sound like Peter? :-)

Forrest, I now feel much more comfortable with you - thanks for writing all that up. And I for one don't think your background is a problem here; I'm a CompSci guy too, after all. I think it brings more to the table than takes away.

> we have to unbundle the overloaded word "reading"

Yes, we have to see its dimensions (although I think context still allows us to simply use the word "readability" for the different aspects). In this context of Typophile, the word/concept refers to the micro typeface level. Sure, not world-altering, and yes, less important than the layout, and certainly the language, but that's what we've chosen to be here for (as individuals), so that's the focus*. This is a healthy sort of separation - which however doesn't mean it should become an end to itself.

* William, if we're really concerned about people (like those whose houses are bulldozed), we would worry about much bigger things than sentence structure... But these are our circumstances, and choices.

Readability versus legibility: It's not that I think the former is a superset of the latter, or that research effort must always address both, it's that readability is more complex, more misunderstood, harder to optimize, and most of all more useful to optimize. Letters have to be extremely strange for a person to give up reading a poster, but even a slight -consciously undetectable- readability defect in a text font can impede completion of a book, or even an article (especially if it's something you have to read, as opposed to enjoy). That said, and as Peter focuses nicely on, the essential decipherment that goes on (at the letter and bouma level) is very important to understand, and that applies to both. It's just that I'm personally in the dark on that - as is virtually everybody else though, it seems.

> you say that undergraduate students may have
> less reading "ability" than post-graduate
> students, but I don't see this is relevant
> to the discussion of *how* people read.

This refers to a classical issue: the different types and degree of reading - which can get quite confusing. The relevance here is this: every [adult] reader uses boumas; but the degree to which multi-letter boumas (and the parafovea) are relied upon depends on experience (among other things); and the key here is that empiricism has [had] trouble detecting this. This is where the difference between what might be -awkwardly- called light versus deep immersion comes in: when a test subject relies very lightly on multi-letter* boumas, the people analyzing the data will simply not see what's happening. When they see something like that "and" being skipped for example, they sort of improvise a tentative explanation, and say more research (ie money :-) is needed; their "scientific integrity" (at least the contemporary fashion of such, not the old Greek style) prevents them from doing what I've done.

* BTW, is there a nice tight term for "more than one"?

> we need more data

Agreed. And we need better data, and better interpretation of it all, by relying on "practitioner review" more than peer review, by not staying aloof towards anecdotalism.

> "I'm sure the way I'm doing things is an improvement

I'm never sure. That would be too Modernist. :-) I only think, and try to act on it. I don't believe in the sagacity of the PL model, so I put serifs on my text fonts for example. I could be putting serifs because that's what the status quo wants, but we already know what I think of the status quo... I do it because it makes [functional] sense. And in your case, if you're really convinced of the PL model (your other choice is to be closer to my view - I can't think of an alternative - although there might be one, or even many) then you should only use serifs fonts for aesthetic effect.

> It's easy to say, for example, that serifs work
> by creating rails of horizontal stress in a text

And if you did you'd be joining in a naive delusion. Leading is what keeps lines together (assuming "normal" word and letter spacing). There are no rails. And we don't need arrowheads on the right sides of serifs either. Serifs bind. They reduce letter individuality in favor of bouma integrity. This btw is where legibility and readability are opposed, although of course not fully opposed. Think of them as two vectors at 90 degrees.

> The reason for the hostility towards anecdotal
> evidence in science is because, in effect, it
> requires us think theologically

I think it's because it requires us to think, period!

--

> a widespread campaign for clear writing that
> has gone on for over seventy-five years

Is it a coincidence that this same time period has seen the darkest hours of humanity?

> The usual problem with journalism is
> not bad writing, but lack of depth.

And you think this and their alleged "good writing" is another coincidence?

> well estabilished knowledge

YOUR chosen knowledge, not everybody else's.

--

> I was eager to hear how William
> might respond to my contentions.

I can think of only two people who have the required depth, breadth, objectivity and intellect to serve as a "moderator" if you will concerning the contents and intentions of Typo13: Herbert Spencer (dead), and Richard Southall (retired?).

hhp

For those who are interested, here and here are brief summaries of Williams' book on good writing.

My friend who is director of the cognitive science program at Georgia Tech tells me that the 'storytelling' model of human understanding is now scientifically recognized as one of the best. This confirms Williams' view that when writing follows that model, it is most direct and easily understandable. When it departs further and further it becomes harder and harder to understand.

Williams has also drawn upon much research in linguistics, as he acknowledges in his book. Of course Williams' book is much better than the summary, but this will give you a taste of what I think is an outstanding work.

William,

Sometimes, complex subjects require complex statements. As far as I'm concerned, my first responsibility when I write for publication is to myself - to write precisely what I mean. If I can then make what I have to say accessible to a non-specialist audience, then I will, but its not a big priority. I have this luxury because hardly anyone but a specialist in quite a narrow field would ever read what I've written. Peter is also writing for a specialist field. This article is only likely to be read by people who want to understand technical issues surrounding readability & legibility. If people want to understand those issues, then they are going to have to put some effort in and concentrate. I realise that you're saying that clearer writing will allow readers to concentrate more on the arguments, but I really think that you're too dogmatic in berating Peter for his writing style.

I haven't read the book by Williams that you refer to, but I do use Fowler sometimes. Lets not get carried away with it, though, as Fowler was a pedantic stuffed-shirt and an appalling snob.

I have not yet read the TYPO 13 articles, so I'm not going pontificate as I usually do. But I am intrigued by the possibility that empirical research might answer some of the most difficult questions facing typographers, in particular how to best space type. I really admire the work that the Clearview people did in testing different letterspacings to determine the optimum legibility. Perhaps analogous research can be done for readability.

The questions I would most like to see answered are:

1. What letterspacing optimizes readability? In Jenson's 1470 Eusebius, the space between nn is almost the same width as the inner space of the n. By the mid-16th Century Comensis Episcopi Nucerni (I'm working from a scan from Updike's <i>Printing Types</i>), that width had become about 3:4. And of course 1960's and 70's phototype took the trend to an extreme. Who's right? To my eyes, the Comensis is a striking example of beautifully spaced old metal type.

2. Should the goal be a completely even page color, where all spaces between letters appear to have exactly the same width, or do subtle variations in spacing help with word recognition?

3. Assuming that subtle variations are desirable, should they be based on metal type standards, or some other principle? To my eyes, pe and oo are two common round-round pairs that usually appear tight, while ob and oy are usually loose. These variations arise naturally from metal type technology, and have survived into the digital age.

4. Should letter spaces be absolutely consistent, so that all images of the same letter-pair look identical? One thing I see frequently in older printed samples but very rarely in modern works is a hairline space slipped into a word. I have not discovered the logic behind the placement of such spaces (Burnhill touches on this point in his book Type Spaces), but am very curious to find what effect they had on readability.

5. How does size affect optimal letterspacing? It is nearly universal for smaller sizes of metal type to be spaced more loosely than larger sizes, but this component of optical scaling is usually missing from digital typography.

Of course, the interaction between letter shapes and spacing opens many cans of worms, because of the huge diversity of letter shapes. I'd be interested in answers to the above questions even assuming the letter shapes are from a traditional roman text font.

Great questions, Raph.

Steve, whatever his personal shortcomings - and I have no idea - Fowler did have a great eye for some things - like 'abstractitis' - that make writing worse and better. The fact that it is still in print 75 years later is a tribute to the fact that it was a breakthrough book in its field.

Williams is better as his advice is more flexible and nuanced. For example, he is not simply for or against nominalization, for or against passive voice. He tells you when each helps and hurts. I suspect that his advantage is that he applies linguistic insights developed since Fowler's day. He also thinks issues of correct word usage - the usual obsession, including Fowler - are of secondary importance.

Steve and Guillaume. On complexity, I think writing should be as Einstein said of scientific theories: as simple as possible, and no simpler. What I reject is needless complexity that just makes the writer difficult to understand. I'm afraid that Peter's article has much of this, but I am reading it for content anyway.

I think those are terrific questions Ralph.

One critique on my TYPO 13 contribution is that it does not provide enough detail to address any such questions. This is a valid critique. Unfortunately the state of the art in the psychology of reading is not to the point where understand reading nearly well enough. Of course progress is being made, and there are many terrific people currently working on the problem.

In my opinion the biggest omission in my paper is any discussion of letter recognition. The crux of the paper is that letters are the primary perceptual unit in reading. The paper presents evidence that we are using letters to recognize words both in the fovea and in the parafovea (contrary to earlier statements I do believe we use the parafovea to recognize letters as far as 15 letters out from the point of fixation). The next obvious question is how do we recognize letters. I need to answer that question satisfactorily in order to have a practical impact on type design.

Peter

> the intemperate tone of my post

William you say your friend's information confirms Williams' view that "when writing follows [the storytelling] model, it is most direct and easily understandable. When it departs further and further it becomes harder and harder to understand,"
And in the preamble to the material in your first link Kenneth Mahrer quotes Williams as saying: "Do not take what we offer here as draconian rules of composition, but rather as diagnostic principles of interpretation"
I can more easily acknowledge the accuracy--and appreciate the relativity--of 'diagnostic' statements like your "when writing follows" statement than I can absolute judgments with good and bad as their terms of reference.

If a story-telling model of human understanding is 'the best', what does this mean for thetic-critical discourse? Does it mean thetic-critical discourse must be avoided or recast according to a storytelling (character+actions) model? And is this always possible?

Yes, Raph's questions are good questions. I suspect each of the three of us--Kevin, Hrant and I--have a different take on questions of spacing. I'll try to articulate my take in a future post. The seeds of a reply appear near the end of my essay.

And William, time (and further exploration or discussion) will tell if my contribution uses language or articulates a point of view that is needlessly complex.

> I do believe we use the parafovea to recognize letters as far as 15 letters out

Is this something new?

And how can this be, when every single test (at least among the ones I've seen, which are however many) indicates that we can't make out individual letters in the parafovea (especially when the letter has immediate neighbors - think of lateral masking for one thing), even when given many seconds to do so, much less during immersion? I've never seen anything over 5 or so - certainly not fifteen!

> I find his ideas about creating harmony between the black and white of text compelling.

But you do realize of course that he's talking about a harmony among the black and white of a bouma, not [just] letters. Most significantly, he applies this to foveal processing too; he places even less faith in the PL model than I do. As we say in Armenian, let's sit crooked but talk straight. And I'm not trying to start a fight between you two, so please don't accentuate your agreements as a way to build fortifications against me - work with me here, let's spill all the beans.

BTW, I agree with the centrality of this harmony too, of course; notan is what we read - this is not news. One difference though between Peter and me is that he wants to see the insides and outsides of boumas weighted equally no matter where they're seen (fovea or parafovea); this is one big place I think he's being too Modernist. To me, the weighting depends on the distance from fixation (for obvious reasons of blur). I think this appeals to me and not him because it's a messy ideological wrench-in-the-machine. It's filthy human effluvium.

--

The mechanics of bouma decipherment is one thing, the belief that boumas exist is another. The former is where notan is the issue (and it's no small matter for sure), the latter is where cohesion (think serifs) are the issue. To me we're discussing the latter - not least because I think serifs, tight letterspacing, etc. do more to bind than bad notan does to hinder reading; we can get used to new shapes, but we can't learn to bind with no glue. Slap serifs on a "funky" skeleton (as long as the degree of divergence is correct), and space it well, and you'll outperform the most notanically-optimal sans in the world (Legato). Well, I think so at least.

Reeling in a bit:
The PL model says you can set a long book in sans and not affect reading fatigue. There is no empirical evidence to counter this view, so the empiricists are happy. There is however the little matter of five centuries of vehement anecdotal opposition to this idea. How do we explain this disparity? But throwing the entire corpus of anecdotal evidence out the window, or by accepting the limits of the PL model? <woolly>Come on.</woolly>

> I will of course share my findings.

Which is very generous. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: we're very lucky to have you, and I think and hope that your role will be pivotal in the evolution of the understanding of readability among practitioners. But you will have to be patient with us.

--

Raph, [my] answers soon.
But read the stuff, dude.

hhp

>>whatever his personal shortcomings
I was referring to hs professional shortcomings...


>>the 'storytelling' model of human understanding is now scientifically recognized as one of the best
I think that would be hugely dependent upon the content of what one is trying to understand.


>>scientifically recognized
Perhaps it is Peter's reluctance to use entirely valueless phrases such as this that makes his writing too long-winded for your tastes.

> Is this something new?

No. I quote from the paper (talking about the moving window study),

> we are using additional information further out to guide our reading.

Sure, I remember that. But, as I rebutted in my own essay*, you do limit the usefulness of this information to things like gross word boundaries which help determine the subsequent fixation point. This is not at all the same thing as saying we can make out and treat as usable information individual letters that deep.

* "The PL model ... only uses general information from the parafovea".

> average saccade length is 7-9 letters

Yes, average...

> Peter would not restrict the primitive used in perception to a single letter.

As of course neither would I. And to me this is the big issue here, if partly only because the notan-decipherment issue is: even harder to grasp; and I feel much harder to apply towards practical design decisions. If we could simply settle the serif-sans thing for example (which does not [necessarily] get [fully] into notan), that would be huge.

hhp

> but Peter would not restrict the primitive used in perception to a single letter.

That's right Kevin, but I would also argue that the primitive used is different for different tasks. For example, the perceptual processing primitive might be a single letter in letter recognition tasks, or in the 'letterwise decipherment' underlying learning to read, or in the acquisition of unfamiliar words, or even perhaps in the checking up on an initially misread word.

I append 'perceptual processing' to 'primitive' in this contact, because what constitutes a primitive to the perceptual processing involved in reading or the perceptual processing involved in the recognition of letters, globally considered, might not be a primitive relative to neurons in the initial layers of the visual cortex. In fact I think it isn't.

In my last post I said:
> I append 'perceptual processing' to 'primitive' in this contact, because what constitutes a primitive to the perceptual processing involved in reading or the perceptual processing involved in the recognition of letters, globally considered, might not be a primitive relative to neurons in the initial layers of the visual cortex.

I might have said: ...what constitutes a primitive relative to the neuronal complexes in the visual word form area might not be a primitive relative to neurons in the initial layers of the visual cortex.