Relevant Font for
Academic Texts:
Study case on
textual paralanguage in Universitas Indonesia
Choosing font for academic texts becomes the
authority of each institution as there is no international standard for this.
Many universities which publish academic papers, including Universitas
Indonesia (UI), choose Times New Roman (TNR) as the standard font.
Nevertheless, initiated by the change of Microsoft default font into Calibri in
2007, some institutions have considered Calibri a suitable font for academic
writing. Although recent studies show Calibri has better legibility on screen,
none of them uses aspects of sociolinguistics to score which font is better.
This quantitative-qualitative study attempts to fill the gap by scoring
formality of fonts in academic contexts. Respondents consisting of 255 UI
students are asked to rate the formality of fonts using Likert scale and
compare their anatomic features which might affect formality. This study finds
TNR is still considered the most formal, with a big gap with that of Calibri,
and that some features of TNR such as serif and dynamic stroke width, which are
missing in Calibri, help the font gain formality.
Keywords: academic text, font,
formality, paralanguage, Universitas Indonesia
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