Essay text is an elegant serif font family with huge stylistic alternates and other typographic niceties. It is intended for setting books and highly legible text face that complements the natural flow of reading. Times New Roman is a Serif font and widely believed as the best font. It is a very clear and the staple font for essays for years. It was the default font on MS Word for some time. The font to be used when writing essays should have two main properties: it should be readable and it should have clearly contrasting italics. Taking these factors into account, it is highly recommended to use a Serif Font.
Serifs are tiny strokes that extend on letters while sans serif fonts do not have the same. Ariel, Calibri, Verdana and Helvetica are examples of sans serif fonts among others. These fonts do not have true italics. As their letters in italics are just slightly slanted to the right, they don’t make good body text. However, these are recommended for headings and single line texts. Whereas, serif fonts have clearly defined italics with a sharper contract and are more readable for longer passages. Times New Roman, Courier, Palatino and New Century Schoolbook are examples of serif fonts. For this reason, the same are recommended for use in the writing of academic papers. The mostly used and common font for a college essay is Times New Roman.
Basically, size of the font should be big enough to read essay comfortably without straining. This size is measured using the “point”. The “point” is basically the percentage of the screen space, which the letter(s) are occupying. One point is almost equivalent to approximately one pixel on a computer screen. Recommended font size for writing essays is between 12 to 14 points. These sizes make text easy to read without necessarily looking bulky and oversized.
It is important to have clear font. Type font confuses people if it is not well defined. As in a few fonts, some letters and symbols are confusing for certain type of people. Words like CS5/CSS, 105/IOS, LJ, LI, Ll, O/0 create confusion. Similarly shaped letters and characters, short ascenders and descenders increase letter confusion and decrease legibility and readability for people with dyslexia. Legibility and clarity are two main factors to be kept in mind while writing. The ideal fonts are not just the easiest fonts to read on web pages but also the fonts available to most of the people. In general, Microsoft fonts are good choice and will be accessible to people.
According to Bureau of Internet Accessibility, the right fonts for website accessibility are Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica and Calibri. These fonts are simple, basic and unadorned, adding no extra flourishes or decoration that may confuse readers on a computer screen. These, being popular font choices are available on most computers, which means that they are accessible to a larger population than lesser popular fonts.
The following pointers gather together some of the recommendations.
Do have:
- Tall x-height: the height of the small letters like m, a, x and r.
- The height difference between ascenders and capital letters, for example, capital “I” and lower case “l” so that they look different.
- Distinguishable characters, for example L, l and 1 should all look different from each other.
- Adequate letter spacing.
But avoid:
- Thin weights on smaller font sizes.
- Narrow-width fonts.
- Block capitals.
- Fonts, where the letters mirror each other, like d, b, p and q, should have features that differentiate them from each other through more than just their ascender and descender position.
Heading font contrast is also important for readability. The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Robin Williams, in her book, stresses the importance of heading hierarchy and contrast. It means headings must be easy to perceive as different from body text and other heading ranks; for example, h2, h3 and h4 headings should be easy to describe and look apart from each other, as well as from body text.
Times New Roman fits better in the long articles, such as newspapers and books, because of readability. On the other hand, Arial is better used in advertisement owing to its clearance and relative big characters. However, while writing essays, many people forget about fonts. Essay writers should focus on gathering information and presenting it nicely. They should also learn how to format their essays properly. It is not out of place to mention that fonts play a huge role when it comes to formatting. One will need to find a font that is appealing to the eye and that is easy to read and have a size that is big enough. Times New Roman is probably the best essay font.
By: Kamlesh Manchanda
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