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When writing my dissertation, I found that changing the font to Comic Sans or Papyrus is an effective way of forcing myself to be self-critical and preventing m
by porpoise 6y ago
When writing my dissertation, I found that changing the font to Comic Sans or Papyrus is an effective way of forcing myself to be self-critical and preventing myself from, for lack of a better phrase, "falling in love" with what I wrote (the "scholarly" classic-looking fonts like Sabon, Garamond, Baskerville tend to have that effect on me)
- ethbr0 6y agoChanging font from Baskerville to Comic Sans is the equivalent of replacing the Queen's English with a New Jersey accent. If the content bears up, you're probably onto something.
- zimpenfish 6y agoYeah, I think this is one of those things that keeps being recommended for writer's block or proofreading to shake you up and give you a fresh perspective.
- ThePadawan 6y agoThis is why Bertrand Meyer formats all his lecture slides this way. See e.g. http://se.inf.ethz.ch/courses/2013a_spring/JavaCSharp/lectures/Lecture_11_A_eiffel_java_Cs.pdf http://se.inf.ethz.ch/courses/2013a_spring/JavaCSharp/lectur... It's readable enough for students to refer back to, but ugly enough that they prefer listening instead of reading along.
- mbo 6y agoSimon Peyton Jones (Haskell committee) also formats all his lecture slides in Comic Sans: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bd1ia/spj_and_comic_sans/c95xz0a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bd1ia/spj_and_com...
- rakoo 6y agoOpenBSD people have "weaponized" Comic Sans by confronting them about font bikeshedding instead of caring about what actually matters: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.html https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00025.ht...
- CornCobs 6y agoIn fact it's been so long since I've seen anyone use it for powerpoint slides (or anything really) that when I came across the "Wearing the hair shirt" talk recently I was hit with a nice nostalgic feeling: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/wearing-hair-shirt-retrospective-haskell-2003/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/wearing...
- amelius 6y agoI'm surprised companies don't typeset their EULAs in Comic Sans. But on second thought, I guess users don't read them anyway.
- WalterGR 6y agoThis is why Bertrand Meyer formats all his lecture slides this way. That's super interesting. Do you know where you learned that? (Interestingly, your comment ranks #1 (after some videos) in Google's results for «bertrand meyer slide format».)
- ThePadawan 6y agoI took several of his lectures during his tenure at ETH Zurich (some time between 2008 and 2014) and it came up at some point.
- WalterGR 6y agoAny visual change lets you see what you've written from a different perspective. Changing the font, changing the formatting (e.g. margins,) changing the page size, and (especially for me) reading it in a different format. I learned this trick from someone years ago. (I think they specifically suggested reading it in a different format?) I wonder if it has a name...