Apparently now, sans-serif fonts are “woke.”
According to The New York Times, Marco Rubio has declared that official State Department documents must use Times New Roman instead of Calibri. The department had switched to Calibri, a sans-serif font, because sans-serif fonts are easier for screen readers to interpret, and for people with dyslexia or low vision to decipher. In the spirit of the new Darwinism, now consideration for anyone who struggles with deciphering serif fonts is forbidden. If they want to read, they should just … I don’t know, cure themselves or something. Freedom!
Admittedly, the story got me thinking about what I would do if I were appointed king of writing for a day.
Obviously, use of the Oxford comma would be mandatory. IHE style rejects the Oxford comma, which is frustrating—I just keep using them and letting the editors do what they do. (Elle Cordova did a brilliant bit on the Oxford comma here.) For my money, Arial is underrated. And of course, starting a sentence with “Being that …” would trigger an immediate tax audit.
But those are about personal style choices of a writer, as opposed to accessibility for readers.
The point of writing is reading. To format writing in ways that defeat comprehension only makes sense if you’re trying to send code behind enemy lines. I don’t think people with dyslexia are the enemy, so that wouldn’t apply here.
Fun fact: The much-maligned Comic Sans font is one of the easiest for people with dyslexia to read. When I learned that, I stopped snarking about it. For that matter, I’m very pro-audiobook, too. It’s all about making it easier to communicate. Blogs, tweets/posts/skeets, podcasts—I’m happy with all of them. (Twitter has some unwelcome baggage, but that’s independent of the format.) The more venues for communication, the likelier it is that someone can find a format that works for them. Putting up barriers just for the sake of putting up barriers is petty.
Having been charged with managing American foreign affairs, I’m confident that Secretary Rubio can find more productive uses of his time.
When The Boy and The Girl visited over Thanksgiving break, I brought out a couple dozen bankers’ boxes full of books in the basement and told them to take anything they wanted.
Watching your grown kids sift through books collected over decades is gratifying, if a bit surreal. I sat in a chair, offering bits of information as they went. I tried not to interfere with their judgments.
The Girl picked about 20, mostly classics of philosophy. (“Hey, you have Dialectic of Enlightenment! Can I take that?” She did.) The Boy picked a smaller bunch.
The books in the basement were the ones that didn’t make the cut to come upstairs. That judgment was based on likelihood of rereading, as opposed to quality. Somehow, after work, I never quite feel like curling up with some Adorno. Can’t imagine why.
As protective as I’ve been of my far-too-many-and-still-counting books, having the kids take the ones they liked felt like giving the books a new life. I’d rather the books have a chance of being read again than just sit in boxes under the stairs. And to the extent they scratch some intellectual itches in the kids, well, the teacher in me loves that.
I remember the origin stories of most of the books. In grad school, the combination of penury and academic ambition meant that book purchases had to be taken seriously. Some very much earned their keep and some didn’t, but that’s to be expected. Some never got read, despite my best intentions. A few were signed by the authors. Several changed how I look at the world. A few still strike me as inexplicably overrated. And some just take me back to remembering what the world looked like at 24, when I made the fraught decision to buy them.
I’m at the Middle States conference in Philadelphia. Félix Matos Rodríguez, from CUNY, gave the opening keynote. It was a strong speech generally, but the part that stuck with me was a metaphor perfectly suited to an academic audience:
When hearing political criticism of higher ed, imagine it’s coming from peer reviewer No. 2. Use what’s valid, and tune out the vitriol.
In most settings, that would have landed with a thud. Here, it killed.
