Judging a Book by its Cover

I started reading Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. One concept reminded me of a mini-lesson I teach in my English 12 class.

Wysocki states when referring to written text, “our texts most often will default to being efficient, and they will be efficient not only in production and distribution but also in the visual layouts and other material choices that help us read through them…” (13).

When I begin teaching the first novel in the course I pull out four different published editions of the same novel (Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe)- spanning throughout several decades of publication. We talk about how we judge books by their covers- and even though the old adage tells us not to, we do, and publishers know this, so they plan accordingly.

I have the students look and peruse each copy, then vote for which book they would choose- and it’s fun to hear their different rationale. This leads to the discussion of how book publishers study psychology to help make decisions regarding book covers, size of book, type of font, size of font, thickness of pages, etc.

Which to me connects to Wysocki in that as readers we aren’t necessarily consciously aware of those elements (font, size, covers), but yet it all factors into our readability. Now throw in the new media, and a whole other level is added!