Times New Roman Isn’t, Either …
When it comes to matters of typography, I am clearly a babe in the woods and sit at the feet of people such as Dick Margulis, who had this to say about my weekend post on the evils of using the Courier font:
Times New Roman was a terrible, terrible choice for a default serif font in Word–and the fact that it is the Word default font is the reason so many people use it. It was designed to be used in a narrow newspaper column (the Times of London), and as such it is a semi-condensed face. That means that with normal (default) margins on US letter-size paper, there are too many characters on a line for comfortable, extended reading.
If you’re going to recommend TNR for mss., you need to recommend, as well, that margins be bumped up to 1.5 inches. That leaves a 5.5 inch type column, and 12 point TNR is satisfactory (if boring) on that measure, because it averages 65 characters per line–close to the limit for extended reading.
However, there are much better choices, even within the default font set that installs with Word, for reading comfort.
So there it is. Times New Roman isn’t your friend, any more than Courier is; so be aware of that, and that there may be issues with your favorite font, as well.
To clarify, I’m speaking here mostly of printed documents that will be sent out as queries and proposals, not as manuscripts to be read on-screen, where one can, of course, change the font so that one can read in whatever way makes one comfortable.
Dick does add:
Oh, and I completely agree with you about Courier. I see it recommended all the time in books about submitting to agents. I even see it listed as a requirement on agent sites. But there’s really no good reason for it that I can see.
Learning about fonts (as I clearly still am) is part of being … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, Doing the Right Thing, Words, Usage on July 21st, 2008