Font choices

A question from a student:

As far as I have understood, there is no default APA style font. In one of the web sources I found out that "main idea is to avoid fonts that are hard to read. The recommended fonts in APA style are 12-pt Times Roman and 12-pt Courier"[1]. However, Courier for me is very hard to read (despite most of the film scripts are written in it). The question is - the times new roman is the default font, or only suggested one, so I can still pick any of the list worldwide?

Fonts are difficult things nowadays. You have hundreds to choose from, if you are using a program like Microsoft Word.

Here are some words of advice, the short form: Use Times New Roman.

Now, the longer form:

Times New Roman is what is called a serif font. Serif means in Latin, "little feet". Serif fonts are more readable, because they've got little ... parts at the end of the letters.

For example, here's Times New Roman:



See the 'little feet' at the end of the letters? Serif fonts improve readability, especially when we are talking about small point sizes for the text. All newspaper stories are serif fonts, for example.

Other fonts are san-serif, 'without little feet'. Garamond is the most popular, and is used for headlines, mostly, where the text is so large that readability is not an issue.

Courier is a serif font (it's origins are related to the telegraph), but Courier font is naturally spread across the entire line of text, no matter how many words it includes, which makes it hard to read. I wouldn't go there.

For the purposes of academic work, I would stick to Times New Roman, unless you have a compelling reason to do differently.