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I was told by a good friend one time that I looked better in a bowling shirt than I did in my rugby style polo shirt. She said that the vertically lined bowling shirt made me look like a taller and slimmer person, whereas the polo shirt made me look like a walking version of the flight of the bumble bee gone wild.
So I asked, “What makes you think that?” She was quite forthcoming and mentioned that if I looked carefully I could see this everywhere around me from wallpaper to uniforms. So of course, this set my mind wandering and noticing things that I had never seen before. You know, like how you never see certain cars until you buy one, and then they’re all over the place. It isn’t that they are everywhere all of a sudden or that they have suddenly flooded the marketplace. The issue is you altered your filtered view of the world to now include these cars.
I started to wonder what else is out there that uses this technique and that’s when my filtered vision let me in on a little unnoticed treasure that was right in front me the entire time: the newspaper column.
I’m guessing many of us don’t even notice because we have become desensitized to its hypnotic powers. But why have newspapers and magazines chosen to use this effect? At first I thought it gave more space for text on the page. Nope, in fact it actually gives less room on the page for text, because they have increased the amount of white space. So how did this technique come into being?
Well, it turns out that it actually started back in the days of the printing press. Each press operator had a limited inventory of letters to print with at any given time. By printing the paper in columns, they could reuse their stock of letters and once they had printed the first column, the press operator would typeset the next column and continue printing.
So why, with all of the technology available, would we continue this practice? I have a couple of theories that work for me (well, OK — they sound good in my head, at least).
The first is … Alien abductions, which have led to the human race having smaller eyes… oops, that one should have stayed in my head.
Another idea I had was Advertising. It creates a very easy to understand unit of measurement for selling advertisements to clients. Take a look for yourself; you will probably notice that the ads in most papers can be measured in columns.
Let’s see… How about thinking back to the traveler of the early to mid-1900s? Having newspapers and magazines in columns made it easier to carry a large volume of content with them but made it easy to fold the paper and see only the article they were reading. But why fold it at all?
Well, when your eyes move less to read the article, it is easier and takes less effort for the brain to process the information. Try this little experiment. Shrink your email message window the next time you’re reading a long message so it appears only on a portion of the screen, and see if it takes less time to read it. I tried it with my stop watch and I improved my reading performance by over 10%. Wow!
You will probably find that nowadays, blogs are crafted into columns, too. I know this helps me to skim articles faster and hone in on those useful nuggets of information that I care about most.
Here are some links for this podcast that will help you understand more about using the Parallel and Newspaper Column features available in your productivity software like Microsoft Word and Publisher.
* Parallel Columns in Your Document
* Changing the Text in Part of Your Publication
* Easier Parallel Columns using a Table
And the next time you’re creating a newsletter or report masterpiece, think about slimming it down so your hard work can bowl ‘em down!
Recommended eTraining Class: “Using Tables Effectively”
Click here to get the sample file in Word Format
Theme music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum
