Font of Wisdom?

A psychologist at the University of Illinois took time off from helping subvert the forces of good and being a part of the nexus of all evil in the universe and discovered something interesting about how people might read an article.

He had folks read a short article on capital punishment after answering a survey that helped identify them as politically liberal or conservative. Afterwards, they answered questions about how intelligently the article was presented and so on. The article was pro-capital punishment. The trick was that half the folks read it in regular 12-point Times while the other half read it in Haettenschweiler, a Germanic-styled typeface that is not easy to process.

The liberal-minded folks who disagreed with the article and who read it in the normal typeface tended not to think the argument was very carefully worked out, while the conservative folks did (that's not always a good way to get a split on capital punishment; I am a pretty conservative character but I oppose the death penalty). But liberal-minded folks who read it in Haettenschweiler showed no difference from the conservative-minded ones in their percentages of agreement or disagreement with the article's position. A similar experiment with a non-political issue produced similar results -- a typeface that is harder to read seems to promote more careful reading.

So if you want people to pay attention to the details and nuances of what you write, you can print it in a legible but more difficult typeface to enhance their focus and concentration.

Of course, there's also the possibility that they're not part of an experiment that requires them to read something, and seeing an article printed in a less-easily read font might cause them to wad it up and throw it away. And in this case, by "they" I probably mean me.