The Rhetoric of Typography: The Awareness and Impact of Typeface Appropriateness

Technical communicators have an emerging body of research in visual rhetoric on which to build our practice, but little of that work has focused on the rhetorical role of typography. The majority of studies focused on typography have examined instead its role in readability and legibility. A handful of studies have investigated typeface persona, exploring the notion that typefaces carry with them a message distinct from that of the verbal text that they represent, and an additional few have investigated the issue of typeface suitability. The studies presented here extend this discussion by investigating whether clashes in typeface and text persona affect readers’ perceptions of the text.