RH Justification & Readability

[Daniel Wise <dewise -at- IX -dot- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Colleagues,

Sometimes having a bit of moss on your North side helps.  I can go back to
the '60s and studies done by Dr. Richard Davis on Air Force TOs at Wright-
Patterson AFB.  In his studies, he prepared identical texts justified right,
ragged right, and ragged right with a vertical rule at the margin.  His
results were documented in papers delivered at STC Annual Conferences (then
called Internaitonal Technical Communication Conferences).

I have donated my copies of those proceedings volumes to Auburn University,
but I recall that Davis's results stirred some heated conversations at the
time.  He stated that he found no significant difference in either reading
speed or comprehension *among his test subjects (AF enlisted men)* when copy
was set ragged right versus justified right.

Keep in mind, though, that we are talking '60s typesetting technology here.
He was typing these pages on typewriters.  Even machines such as the IBM
Executive, which had *proportional spacing*, left rivers of white coursing
through justified copy.  Hyphenation was also the order of the day to fill
end-of-line gaps.  Copy prep was slow and costly.  Right justification was
an expensive manual, labor-intensive, process.

Concerning Wheildon's work, I have to say that someone on the copyediting-l
group was kind enough to send me the appendix in which Wheildon describes
his test methods.  From what I read, his work was not very scientific.

Today, we can set justified right for the same cost as ragged right.  We
also have forsaken hyphenation, making some lines appear with huge gaps
between words and picket fence interletter spacing.  Very short line measure
compounds this problem.  For this reason you find some newspapers abandoning
justified right.  The solid set is more pleasing to the eye than the big
gaps as well as easier to read.

Not a very scientific commentary, I'm afraid, but I guess you can tell I am
not a big champion of right justification.

If you are scattering blocks of copy among graphics, justification may help
as a design feature.  In very formal documents, such as legal documents,
justification may be desirable to lend an air of formality to the pages.
One can find all sorts of applications in which right justification may be
superior, but for plain-vanilla text in a manual, I don't think so. However,
YMMV.

Dan Wise
dewise -at- ix -dot- netcom -dot- com

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