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There are studies (I don’t know how good - this is a second hand account of a conference talk) that suggested using difficult to read typefaces or deliberately
by bigfudge 4y ago
There are studies (I don’t know how good - this is a second hand account of a conference talk) that suggested using difficult to read typefaces or deliberately degrading texts by photocopying multiple times helped retention. Perhaps writing in awkward forms is a similar effect.
- szarnyasg 4y agoMaybe they meant this paper? Daniel Oppenheimer et al.: Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wd1s7hj https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wd1s7hj "Study 1 found that harder to read fonts led to increased retention in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to real-world classroom environments." I'm not an expert on this topic, so I don't know whether this result was replicated since. If it indeed works, then kudos to my university's physics department for making use of this effect - they had a habit of handing out physics cheat sheets and various MATLAB code snippets that have been photocopied for 15+ years from one copy to another.