Apparently it's not just the Poorhouse who upon receiving an email that that features some handwriting-esque cursive font has a physical inability to be arsed to read it, let alone act on it. Of course this produces issues here and there with his corporate masters, but then again, so does the policy of auto-binning anything marked with the red exclamation mark of urgency.

Anyhow, this month's Scientific American reports results of an interesting study on the psychology of typeface. Now, that description makes it sound really fascinating, doesn't it?

Song and Schwarz, a couple of psychologists in the US, wrote down some instructions for an exercise regime. In fact they wrote them down twice. Once ineveryone's favourite-by-default san serif font "Arial", and one in some nonsense "Brushscript". It may, or may not, have looked something like this artist's impression:

They then divided up a bunch of presumably innately lazy students into 2 groups. One set got the nice printed exercise instructions inArial ; group 2 got the same document, but formatted in dodgy brush - akin apparently to text handwritten with a Japanese paintbrush. After reading, they were then asked a few questions regarding their opinion of the exercise activity described - would they consider following it, how hard would it be, could they tolerate it each day, and so on.

The results?

Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising: they believed that the regimen would take less time and that it would feel more fluid and easy. Most important, they were more willing to make exercise part of their day.

Yes, Arial makes you fit! As Scientific American surmises, "the students’ brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for the ease of actually doing push-ups and crunches". The theory goes that the brush-script instructions were harder to read, therefore implanting in the subject's minds that the activity described itself is harder to do.

All decent experiments deserve a repetition, and what better opposite test theme to choose than that of food? 2 more sets of instructions were written out, this time describing how to make a sushi roll. Yuck. One group were given theArial font version, the others got the brushscript one. Again, after reading, questions were asked regarding the difficulty of the task - how much skill do you need, how long would it take, could you really be bothered, etc.

Predictably, given you already read part 1 of the experiment above, the brushscript folks "saw the task as time-consuming and requiring a high level of culinary skill; they were not apt to try it themselves".

So what do we learn? Well, some would say it's quite obvious, but the Poorhouse inbox alone provides evidence otherwise. If you want to encourage people to do something then make sure your instructions are clear. Likely it's not just the font at issue here, but rather a general sense of understandability. Using long, confusing words or wittering on at unnecessarily great length could also have been a deterrent (case in point: has this website ever actually made you want to do something?), but physical presentation nonetheless appears to play a part. There really is no need to disguise your written word with the form of authentic writing from a 17th century Gothic vampire overlaid on a non-contrasting background of fake blue skies.

On a related matter, the Poorhouse heard of YourFonts.com today. For a while there's been services to convert your handwriting, of all things, to a font. Now there's a free one should you ever want to really encrypt your written word - if you've got the Doctor-esque handwriting (but sadly not pharmaceutical resources) of the Poorhouse. It'll even include your signature, should you want to bandy it around.

The Poorhouse can't think of anything un-annoying you could do with a font based on your handwriting, but somehow it sounds quite cool to have anyway.