The Comic Sans Experiment

It's the first of November so once again I will be participating in the annual madness that is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I've written other posts about NaNoWriMo in the past but for those of you who aren't familiar with it, NaNo is when writers across the globe come together and cheer each other on as they attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. It's both insane and fun. Yes, I understand that I may have a somewhat skewed interpretation of the word "fun" and yes, I know there are people out there who routinely write more than 50K words a month. NaNoWriMo isn't for them, it's for the rest of us.

However, this year I am going to change things up a bit. Recently, one of my friends shared a post on Facebook about how writing using the Comic Sans font can make you more productive. Screen shots of the post are shown below:

I even did an internet search on the phrase "does using Comic Sans make you more productive." The first page of results was nothing but article after article stating that yes, it does.

In a way, it makes sense. Times New Roman is very formal and is The Official Font of Everything. Editors and publishers want our manuscripts in Times New Roman (double-spaced, thank you very much) and, during my almost thirty-four years as an employee of the federal government, Times New Roman was a requirement for all of our official correspondence. I suspect the same is true for most private organizations as well. Comic Sans is a more laid-back font, the type of font willing to kick back and watch the games with you on the weekend. So, when we're typing in Times New Roman, as I am now, our subconscious knows that whatever we're working on, even a rough first draft, must be a Big Deal so we are mentally typing at attention, second-guessing each word and self-editing ourselves to the nth degree. To me, it seems only logical that using a less formal font such as Comic Sans let our subconscious know that hey, this isn't the be-all-end-all, it's okay to just relax, be creative, and let the words flow.

So, during this NaNoWriMo, I'm going to conduct The Comic Sans Experiment and see if it really helps me be more productive. If it does, I'll probably do all of my writing in Comic Sans from now on. After all, it's easy to change the font of a document before submitting it. I'll post an update on the outcome next month.

Have any of you tried using Comic Sans to improve your productivity?

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