Typographical Noise

Since I am tired of reading technical manuals, data-sheets, "other people's" code, and other publications, I thought I would remind people of lessons learned back in the '70s and earlier.

Enjoy...

Filtering Typographical Noise from Technical Literature

By failing to use various typography guidelines, technical communicators often introduce distracting "noise" into their documents. Research in typography can be applied by technical writers, editors, and illustrators to help filter out much of this undesirable interference.

Most technical writers, editor, and illustrators in the electronics field are familiar with such "noise" sources as static communications sets, own-ship screw beats that play havoc with aural and visual sonar reception, or "snow" on television and radar screens. Perhaps few have considered "noise" as something to be dealt with in the written word. This article defines noise as it applies to writing, mentions briefly numerous sources of the phenomenon, and elaborates on typographic noise.

When applied to writing, noise is defined as the degree to which the meanings of the writer and the reader are less than absolutely identical. Stated another way, it is the difference between what the writer means and what the reader interprets the writing to mean.

After dwelling on noise in this context, the experienced technical writer and editor probably will think of several obvious sources. e.g. poor punctuations, poor sentence and paragraph constructions, poor organization, poor selection of words, and failure to define the reader properly. A less obvious source, however, is the poor selection of typography.

Typography research done in the past can provide technical communicators with certain guidelines for making their documents more readable. Common factors to consider when deriving these guidelines are:

1. Line Length, type size, and leading.
2. All-capital versus lower-case letters.
3. Italic versus bold-face type.
4. Hyphens at the end of lines in unjustified composition.
5. Justified versus unjustified columns.
6. Ink and paper color combinations.

Before discussing these typographic noise factors, I want to make it clear that I am not proposing that every document going out the door include all of the recommendations in this article. I am well aware of certain limitations put on some technical literature by such factors as customer specifications, production expediency, and layout goals. What I am suggesting is that you follow the guidelines when practicable to provide the reader with a more legible document.

Line Length, Type Size, And Leading

In 1940, D.G. Paterson and Miles Tinker, two psychologists at the University of Minnesota, conducted a study on the legibility of various combinations of length, type size, and leading (space between lines of type). Their findings, substantiated in later studies by Tinker and others, indicate that 10-point type with the length ranging from 14 to 15 picas is the easiest to read. Furthermore, they report that an ideal combination is 10-point type, 19 pica line length and 1 or 2 points of leading between lines.

They add, however, that the following combinations of type size versus line length are acceptable: 8-point type, 17-pica line; 12-point type, 23-pica line, and 14-point type, 27 pica line.

(end of part I)