Finals week is coming up around the corner. Everyone is looking over their notes, everyones stressing and some are doing superstitious methods as a desperate attempt to remember all the material. One easy new tip that has been proven to help people remember their notes better is to type your notes up, and then print them out in a silly hard to read font. It is proven that silly font, or hard to read font is better remembered. Obviously, typing everything up helps you remember it. But then when reading over the printed notes, the silly font helps you remember it. This works for all subject where memorization is required.

Scientist found this out accidentally. Scientist conducted an experiment originally about font size. The experiment was to give a list of random words in different sizes to students and test which ones they remembered. The scientist had thought that the largest words would be remembered while the smaller words would be forgotten. But this was false. Larger font did not help remember the words. The scientists decided to test whether font has an impact on memory. And turns out it does! Psychologists from Princeton and Indiana University conducted a small study. There were 28 participants of both men and women. The psychologists gave the participants a reading about 3 different species of aliens, each species had seven different characteristics like “blue eyes” or “eats pollen”. Half of the participants read the information from the standard Arial font and the other half read the article in Bodoni MT. Bodoni is an unfamiliar font which is harder to read. Those who had studied in the harder-to-read fonts outperformed the others on the test, 85.5 percent to 72.8 percent, on average. (article here)

After these results were found a much larger study was conducted. “involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes” (article here)

The theory behind this is if the font is written in a harder to read font then you cannot skim through the material. You must sit and actually read every word which makes you remember it. If you are concentrating on what each word says then you will be more likely to remember it. Although there has only been two studies. The two studies have been consistent with their findings. I know for my finals I plan on studying with silly font. Because whats to lose!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/health/19mind.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://lifehacker.com/5672301/hard-to-read-fonts-can-make-text-easier-to-remember