As I read Jo Mackiewicz’s article “What Technical Writing
Students Should Know About Typeface Personality”, one little phrase caught my
eye.
“Students, after all, are not bound by corporate style manuals” (pg. 2).
This made me laugh a little. Sure students are not bound by
corporate style manuals, but they are certainly not as free to do as they like
creatively as the sentence implies. Mackiewicz is talking specifically about
technical writing students. He says they must learn how to select appropriate
fonts, but he also says there are not constraining style guidelines. This is
not exactly true, and it made me thing about students in general—particularly
middle/high schoolers. I think that often even basic guidelines (essentially this
is “right”, this is “wrong” for an essay) can make it difficult
for a student to think-outside-the-box (sorry..ironic cliché) when required
to do so later on— when the student needs to be ‘stand out’ to apparently be
successful.
I did a quick Google search.
Google will deliver what’s asked of it, but I
think the results are still interesting.
I got a ton of teachers’ requirements
for assignments—and they’re nearly all Times New Roman size
12. My question is: why!? Why are teachers scared of letting
students pick their own font? Kids nowadays are so tech-savvy, I think they can
be trusted to know not to use Curlz
MT. Students are taught that a very specific “look” for their
essay is correct. So going outside of that can be uncomfortable—something I
experienced when doing our first assignment. Suddenly having the freedom to
present my info in any format? Woah.
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