This chapter focuses on how people read. It is very important to understand how people are reading our information so that is it read correctly. It starts by disputing something we learned at a young age: that reading capital letters are more difficult than reading sentence case letters. According to "myth" we've learned that the eye is not so much triggered by the shape of the word, but more so anticipating the shapes of the letters for recognition.
As we've all experienced, reading and comprehending are not one and the same thing. The chapter discusses the use of a Flesch-Kincaid formula can aid in determining how difficult something you've written is to read. For example, thus far my synopsis is rated at a 12th grade reading level and has an ease of 41 to read (on a scale to 90 where 90 shows ease of readability as seen in comic books).
A few more take aways I found important in this chapter: It takes different areas of the brain to view, listen, speak, and generate words. As humans we naturally look for patterns and the use of serifed fonts can help lead us letter to letter. Font choice is extremely important; an overly decorative or difficult to read typeface will result in the reader losing the meaning of the text. Font size is important; it's important to have your font big enough so that your readers of varying ages may read it (this blog is a bad example of this). Reading on a computer screen is more difficult than reading in print and there are necessary steps to take in order to make it easier for your viewer to do so such as adding contrast between foreground and background, breaking up text into chunks, and using larger point size. People read longer line lengths more quickly, but are more comfortable with shorter line lengths.
DEFINITIONS
Saccade- movement of the eyes between fixed points. An example of a saccade is the rapid eye movement between words when we are reading. We might not realize that the eyes are moving rapidly because we feel like we read in smooth sentences, but realistically our eyes are bouncing from word to word.
Fixation- fixation is the moment of stillness or pause between the saccade when reading. The eyes bounce between words and usually take a small pause which is called fixation.
CHAPTER ANALYSIS
This chapter felt like a review of earlier classes in my study. As a graphic designer I absolutely must have a tight grasp on typography and readability in order to express my ideas with type. Hierarchy and the use of titles and headlines is very important in my field and in our society. Unfortunately, I feel like people take-away the headline more than the information written after it, so it is immensely important to get the overall idea of the piece in the headline. I can't begin to explain how many times I've seen people post exclamations on facebook by quoting the title of an article from The Onion as truth instead of farce. It's incredibly frustrating, but our society is more interested in speed than content it seems. Portlandia hits home in a funny skit, "Did You Read?" about competitive reading. To me this sums up more than just our obsession with headlines, but really our obsession with knowing many things and being less focused on one specialty.
My favorite section in this chapter was the section that focused on checking readability with the Flesch-Kincaid formula. I think it is a really useful tool to use when writing for a specific audience. Of course, this means that you need to know your audience before writing for them. I will really use this tool in my future when designing and copy writing for specific audiences.
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