Show the Font Some Love on Comic Sans Day

Today is Comic Sans Day. No, really, it is!

I previously wrote about the effectiveness of the Comic Sans font in 2017 (“Vary the Fonts in Your Outlines”). While outlines are a cornerstone of bar exam preparation, it might be too late to create comprehensive outlines with the exam just a little more than weeks away.

You are now in the final stretch. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still take advantage of Comic Sans.

You might be wondering, "Comic Sans? Isn't that the font everyone loves to hate?" It's true that Comic Sans has garnered a lot of criticism and even sparked an anti-font movement. Yet, despite its quirky and informal appearance, Comic Sans holds an unexpected advantage: it can help you concentrate and remember information better.

Tim Harford, an economist and author of the book, Messy: How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, highlights an interesting phenomenon: fonts that are harder to read can actually enhance focus. Harford references a study conducted by psychologists at Princeton University, where school handouts were reformatted in either easy-to-read or harder-to-read fonts. The results were striking—students who received the handouts in the difficult, ugly fonts performed better on their end-of-term exams across various subjects.

The reason behind this is simple: when information is presented in an unusual or difficult-to-read format, our brains pay more attention. We process the information more deeply, leading to better retention and understanding.

With three weeks remaining, you can still enhance your study techniques using Comic Sans to create quick review sheets and electronic flashcards. These tools can help you focus on the most critical information and improve retention as you complete your commercial bar review courses.

For quick review sheets, highlight the most crucial rules and exceptions in Comic Sans to make them stand out. When it comes to electronic flashcards, using apps like Anki, Quizlet, or Brainscape can be very effective. Customize the fonts within these apps, setting key terms and rules in Comic Sans to make them more noticeable.

Additionally, when reviewing explanatory answers (for multiple-choice questions) and sample response (for essay questions), type the rules you might have misunderstood when answering the questions. Use Comic Sans to highlight the part of the rule you did not fully grasp or apply correctly.

By incorporating these techniques into your final weeks of study, you can make the information more engaging and easier to remember.