SHOUTING: the lost episodes

[Arnold Zwicky]

thanks to michael quinion, the lost postings can be restored:

From:                   Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
Date sent:              Mon, 9 Sep 2002 08:53:07 -0700 (PDT)
To:                     TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
Subject:                Re: SHOUTING; emphasis?

michael quinion:
 >All-caps messages are harder to read than a mixture of caps and
 >lower-case...

i'm not saying that this claim is wrong, but it is certainly not
proven.  i have no doubt that there are experiments showing that
readers read all-caps text (somewhat) more slowly than mixed-case
text, rate it as more tiring to read, etc.  but the subjects for
such experiments are biased by experience; most of what they have
read in their lives will have been mixed-case text, so they are
merely judging as easier what they're most accustomed to, scarcely
a surprising result.

 >...and they do seem to jump out of the page at you in an
 >aggressive way.

this is quite clearly the result of experience.  undoubtedly
*important* experience for people who are writing; you want to
gauge the way your audience will respond to what you've written.

i'm agnostic about the claim in its universal form, however.  i'm
similiarly agnostic about the claim that serif fonts are easier to
read than sans serif fonts, and for similar reasons.  these claims
might or might not be true, but much of the effect is sufficiently
explained by the generalization that the more familiar is easier
to process than the less familiar.

another example, from my own life...

i learned to read music - that is, to sing from musical notation on a
printed page - in a scheme where the location of notes is indicated by
the location of ovals with respect to horizontal lines.  the shape of
the note head is meaningless; only its spatial location is
significant.  this is the only sort of music that most of you will
have seen, so you'll take the "round-note" notation for granted;
processing of the familiar ovals is automatic.

in 1989 i began singing in a "shape-note" tradition (there are
several such traditions), specifically Sacred Harp singing, where
there are *four* shapes for note heads: triangle, oval, rectangle,
diamond.  the different shapes indicate relative pitch, with respect
to the tonic note of the scale.  the shapes have names - fa, sol,
la, mi, respectively - so that our tradition is sometimes called
"fasola singing", for the names of the first three notes of the
major scale.

before a group begins singing the words of a song, they normally
"sing the shapes", that is, sing the melody using the names of the
shapes only.  this is a way to familiarize yourself with the melody
(the words might be distant on the page from your line), and the
shapes provide useful information about the intervals between notes.
so the shapes make it "easy" to read the music.

but only if you've automatized the system.  in the beginning the
shapes are difficult and disorienting.  we give new singers a cheat
sheet, encourage them to sing la-la-la if they feel lost, and we try
to put them between strong experienced singers who will carry them
along.  nevertheless, at first the burden of reading shapes is heavy.
even if you're just singing la-la-la, all that extra visual
information on the page, where there ought to be just ovals, is
distracting.

then you become proficient, and the shapes are really really helpful.
marvelously useful redundancy.

and *then*, if you don't do a lot of singing from ordinary notation
and are confronted with some of it again (in a hymnal, say), all those
ovals are really really hard to process.  everything is sol; how can
that be?  you have to train yourself to use vertical distance alone to
judge intervals, to pay attention to tiny details of the notation.  if
you're an experienced shape-note singer, the shapes are the primary
processing cue, and the vertical location with respect to the lines
is a subsidiary cue, much of it redundant.

i now find "round-note" music surprisingly difficult and awkward to
sing from.  (footnote [so to speak]: i play the piano from round-note
music without any trouble, just as i've always done.  the routinized
pathway from visual input to my fingers is now different from the
routinized pathway from visual input to my vocal apparatus.)  i've
been considering taking part in a 9/11 singalong of the mozart requiem
at stanford's memorial church, but the prospect of dealing with 50
minutes of intricate music all in round notes is daunting indeed.
(to make things worse, the way the four parts are distributed among
the singers in shape-note music is significantly different from the
way they're distributed in "ordinary" music, so i no longer even know
what *part* i should be singing.  it's all very disorienting.)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), stressing the role of context
  and experience

From:                   Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
Date sent:              Mon, 9 Sep 2002 14:22:23 -0700 (PDT)
To:                     TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
Subject:                Re: SHOUTING; emphasis?

michael quinion, quoting me:

  >> i'm not saying that this claim is wrong, but it is certainly not
  >> proven.  i have no doubt that there are experiments showing that
  >> readers read all-caps text (somewhat) more slowly than mixed-case
  >> text, rate it as more tiring to read, etc.  but the subjects for
  >> such experiments are biased by experience; most of what they have
  >> read in their lives will have been mixed-case text, so they are
  >> merely judging as easier what they're most accustomed to,
  >> scarcely a surprising result.

 >Are you not perhaps agreeing with my underlying point here? If
 >people are used to reading caps/lc text in books and hence find
 >all-caps messsages less easy to assimilate, then that is still
 >empirically true and a point to bear in mind when writing text.

true, a point to bear in mind.  but if we're talking about a short
text, we're probably talking at most a second of extra time.  and it
might actually be useful to the reader to have to slow down and attend
to some of the details of a short text.

the cost to the reader seems to me to be mostly annoyance - but how
much the reader is annoyed by dealing with slightly unfamiliar text
varies a lot from reader to reader.  there are people who bridle at
accommodating in any way to the unfamiliar, and people who are good at
getting in the groove, and everything in between.  (i've had students
who maintain that lecturers with an american dialect different from
theirs are incomprehensible and won't deal with them, others who tell
me in all seriousness that they couldn't take a male professor
seriously who didn't wear a suit and tie, and on and on.  i'm sure
that there are students who wouldn't take a course from me now because
i'm "too old" and consequently out of touch with their backgrounds and
interests.  and there certainly have been students who dropped out of
my courses when they discovered i was gay.  i'm sorry about all of
this, especially in a university setting, where experience with the
unfamiliar is one of the points of the exercise, but you can't fix
everything.)  of course you want to adjust what you do to the needs of
your audience, but then those are various, and anyway you have your
own goals, styles, and needs.  there are all sorts of trade-offs here,
and there's no one right way.

i'm not, in fact, disputing that most of the time it's a bad idea
to put all of your text in all-caps.  but the reason for that is not
that there is some general principle of processing involved, but
rather for the reason that others have given: in the current milieu
on the internet, a lot of readers will experience all-caps as
shouting, and unless that's the effect you want you should probably
avoid it.  this has a lot - maybe everything - to do with convention,
but probably not much to do with universals of eye-brain connections.

  >> i'm agnostic about the claim in its universal form, however.  i'm
  >> similiarly agnostic about the claim that serif fonts are easier
  >> to read than sans serif fonts, and for similar reasons.  these
  >> claims might or might not be true, but much of the effect is
  >> sufficiently explained by the generalization that the more
  >> familiar is easier to process than the less familiar.

 >I'm hampered by not having any experimental results to hand (and
 >this isn't my field anyway) but my erratic memory recalls that
 >serifed fonts provide more information to the reader because there
 >are more redundancies and therefore more chances for data to be
 >spotted (not consciously, but at the level of automatic pattern
 >recognition). But don't quote me ...

you excised my shape-note discussion, but there really was a relevant
point there.  shape-note notation provides useful redundancy, but it's
terribly difficult for the inexperienced to cope with.

the tricky point comes when you say "provides more information to the
reader".  there are two possible contributions to this effect: the
information that is in some sense *in the signal* (so that an
appropriately designed processor could make use of it), and the nature
*of the processor* (its inherent limitations and its preferential
abilities as determined by experience).  i don't know whether serifed
fonts can be argued to have more information in them (independent of
who's reading them), but i'm certain that the previous experience of
readers makes a contribution to ease or difficulty.  we could argue
about whether this contribution is big enough to care about as a
practical matter, but there is at least some such contribution.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)