The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence
into this:
—Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)
Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.
The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.
The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.
The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.
Over the summer, I’m planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I’m blogging this for future reference.
My initial reaction is that Jefferson & co did not write that sentence to be read in that manner. It is one thing to compose in such a form and display it in that form, and quite another thing to reformat a 250-year-old text well past conventional font type and size.
The audience of the DoI was accustomed to linear, complex sentences. The more we rearrange it for readability and accessibility, as desireable as those things are, the more original context is lost.
When you lean on visual depictions of abstract levels of generality, you have to be careful. A sentence with the action left in the stress position – the main clause verb is ‘requires’ – the usual power of such a cursus is diminished by the artifical breaks, as the cadence is completely new. I suppose the brain would subtract the breaks, of course, like the frames of eyeglasses, given time, but I wonder what happens to the overall sense of what a sentence is.
My second reaction is that it makes me think of columns on a Torah scroll – something with a serious amount of built-in white space.
Mike’s thoughts of poetry form echo my first reaction–why then would poetry seem more difficult to read if formating is at its optical best?
But there is a point here and I’m aware of it chiefly because I am currently reading a novel in book format that is 6″x9″ and am alert to the fact that my eyes are going back and forth between lines because of the wider pages versus traditional paperback 4-1/2 to 5″ widths. Of course, this could have something to do with age and length of one’s arms…
Fascinating! Scary — and can’t quite explain why — but it’s really intriguing.
I hope
that online service
will likewise
transform all poems
into solid blocks
of
traditional-paragraph-formatted text,
so that we may equally
read them differently.
;-)