Comments on: #Tutorial: Avoid Centered Text

By: Paul Stiles

Paul Stiles — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 02:22:20 +0000

I think it’s interesting that the way writing is aligned defines the purpose of the writing. You would almost never use centered text for writing a traditional paragraph,but its almost required when writing a title. Personally I don’t like justified text alignment because the rivers become prominent in my writing. The only time I would ever use justified is if it removes widowed or orphaned words from the bottom of my text.

By: KC Cowan

KC Cowan — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 01:44:07 +0000

I never took the time to understand how flush left and justified were different. The fact that these little rivers appear in justified writings is now much more obvious, and I can definitely understand how they can be distracting. I used to always center the information in my writings, but after seeing how flush left makes the paper look cleaner, I will definitely be more aware to use flush left from now on.

By: Hassan Alamir

Hassan Alamir — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:30:00 +0000

Hey,
I speak Arabic and we write from right to left. Yes, we have an inverse F-shaped reading pattern.

By: Tom Conroy

Tom Conroy — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:17:16 +0000

I have never seen rivers in justified text until now. I always saw gaps, but not patterns of gaps that travel from line to line. Now I will never be able to un-see them in newspapers and wherever else justified text is used. I suppose that is a reason why I never saw justified text as a problem until after watching the video.

On a side note, I wonder if languages that are read right-to-left have an inverse “F-shaped” reading pattern.

By: Tracy Duong

Tracy Duong — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 18:56:58 +0000

Flush left is the best choice for body text alignment when reading from left to right. It eliminates rivers and it’ll make your document look more modern. Flush right would be good choice for languages that are read from right to left like Arabic and Hebrew.

By: Gabriel Irigaray

Gabriel Irigaray — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 18:22:26 +0000

Tying this back to the #Infographic for today and the importance of understanding the differences in cultures, we can see how our writing style is also affected by this. When written, some languages are read from right to left as opposed to left to right and require that the right edge of the text be flush to make the writing easy to read. It is also important to consider the style of writing you are using when determining how to align your text. If you are using a column format, it might be more beneficial to avoid justifying the alignment to avoid “rivers” in your paper. On the other hand, having lines that span the entirety of the page might benefit more from this style of writing as it makes it easier for the reader and does not have the side effect of creating “rivers”.