Digital Cheat Sheet

 Steve Jobs by Steven Paul

The bread and butter of any kind of college experience is writing papers. Some get off with relatively few, but more often than not people end up writing dozens of papers throughout their time in school. Most essay prompts are as stated "the student is to write: 'x' number of pages in 12-size, type Times New Roman font, double-spaced". Occasionally some teachers will deviate from the formula, but more often than not that is the standard and accepted font, but why?

Times New Roman was actually commissioned in 1931 by the British newspaper, The Times, because it was badly in need of a more readable font. It was created after a Stanley Morison wrote a piece criticizing the paper for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The general public in the United States was introduced to this font for personal consumption when Microsoft began packaging it with Microsoft Windows 3.1. The font has been omnipresent in every iteration of Microsoft Word and was only recently replaced by Calibri in the 2007 edition as the default font. 

I understand that Times New Roman is easy to read, but there is an entire world of fonts to be explored and embraced. I am not advocating using stuff like Comic Sans or Wingdings as an accepted font, but why must we be locked down to using simply one font? I know for sure that every edition of Microsoft Word has at least ten to twenty other font choices than Times New Roman. Why are fonts like Helvetica or Georgia not accepted into the cannon as well? Fonts are not something you think of every day, but they add personality to any sort of publication. A comic book's font embraces the wacky design of the heroes and villains, and makes sounds like "BOOM" and "POW" fun to read. Movie posters use different fonts to show off the type of movie that they are trying to sell you. An Alvin and the Chipmunks movie poster font is much more fun and lighthearted than a more serious movie like Avatar.

I understand there is only so much personality that you can force into a history paper (Trust me, I have tried), but I believe that giving the student the choice between, say, four to five different fonts would an ideal solution. This would give the student more of a choice and help break up the monotony of grading dozens of papers for the professor.

I submit that these three be considered: 

1. Helvetica
2. Cambria 
3. Georgia

Take it as you will, but writing multiple papers a year I get tired of having the Times New Roman font burnt into my retinas. It has gotten so bad that I find myself typing a paper in Helvetica and then reformatting it when I have to submit the paper to my professor. Having different fonts will not change the world, but in my humble opinion it will make paper writing and review slightly less mundane. 

-Hunt Henning