Physics for You

When Keith Johnson’s Physics for You textbook burst on the UK publishing scene in 1978 it had a profound effect on textbook publishing.

Before 1978 science textbooks were dry, dull, humourless, with high reading ages and few illustrations. Physics for You changed that, in over 20 ways described below.

Before 1978	The Cover	Cartoons	Double-page Spreads
Layout of paragraphs	‘Sculpted’ text	Personal Words	Typeface, font
Reading Age	‘Fig. 12.13’	illustrations	People/faces/hands
Formulas	‘at work’	Revision aids	Limericks, jokes

Before 1978

It’s hard to believe now, but school textbooks used to be laid out like a novel. That is, the text was just streamed on from page to page with no thought for layout except for a new chapter starting on a new page. A well-known textbook of the day started a new topic on ‘Energy’ (a major topic in Physics if ever there was one) just 3 lines before the bottom of a right-hand page!
Diagrams and photos (in black & white) were fairly sparse and normally not placed next to the relevant text. They were referenced by items like “See Fig 12.13”, so that by the time the student had found the correct illustration they’d probably lost track of the relevant text.
Sentences were long, sometimes over 50 words, and reading age formulas could give ‘impossible’ numerical values of over 40 years for the reading age!
Students were challenged linguistically before they could get past the text to the science. Physics as a subject was presented in a dry ‘academic’ way, with little relevance to a student’s life.

Double-page Spreads
Keith insisted that every double-page spread was designed by him as an entity, with no sentences split between pages. Each new topic was introduced and developed on a single page, or more usually on a double-page spread.This approach in itself immediately made the book more accessible to the reader [6], [7].

Sculpted text
Previously, textbooks had almost always used fully-justified text so that the right-hand ‘coastline’ of the text was a strict vertical line. This makes it more likely that a less-competent reader will lose their place and perhaps jump a line with consequent loss of comprehension. Keith insisted on:
	Un-justified text, to give an irregular right-hand coastline, to help readers.
	No hyphens were ever allowed to break long words at the end of a line.
	Hyphens were sometimes inserted deliberately at the first mention of a complex word, to help the reader. For example: electro-magnetism, photo-synthesis.
	Wherever possible, sentences were of the form: Subject -> verb -> object. For example: ‘The cat sat on the mat’, and not: ‘On the mat sat the cat’ or ‘On the mat the cat sat’, etc.
	Generally, shorter ‘Saxon’ words like ‘got’ and ‘put’ were used in preference to longer ‘Norman’ words like ‘obtained’ and ‘placed’.
	An active writing style was used, with frequent questions to the reader, to avoid a dull passive ‘voice’.
	Pages include a large number of ‘?’ marks, aiming to demand attention from the reader. Often these questions are on knowledge that the reader may not yet have …but the answers can be found or deduced from an illustration or statement somewhere on the same spread …so the reader has to actively search for the answers.
	In addition: He fine-tuned the text (‘sculpted’ it) by adding / deleting / selecting words in such a way as to make the end of a line an ‘invisible comma’, where a reader might naturally pause to assimilate the content, before their eyes jump back to start the next line. An example (from the first page of Physics for You) A first draft might read as shown here: where the vertical lines indicate the available space for the text block (because of artwork etc). The line-breaks are clumsy, even if the hyphenation were removed. A slight change to the wording provides a better result, as shown: where the ending of the lines now form ‘invisible commas’ with natural pauses to allow the reader’s brain to assimilate each successive idea or concept. Each of the 7 lines is now a complete thought. For a single paragraph this effect may not be significant, but used throughout a book it has a beneficial effect for the reader.

Typeface, fonts, letter-spacing
Before publishing Physics for You, some research was done on fonts. It is well known that serif fonts are generally more legible that non-serif fonts, but in addition care was taken to avoid the “spectacles” ‘g’ that was often used in earlier books, in favour of the kind of ‘g’ that is more like a pupil would write. Similarly with the closed lower-case letter ‘a‘ rather than an open ‘a’: And a lower-case letter ‘e’ that is open and more legible. The current edition of Physics for You uses a Souvenir typeface, but with the ‘a’ changed to be a closed ‘a‘: This typeface has 2 levels of boldness, which are used to emphasise key ideas and key words or definitions.
A double-space is used after every full-stop (period) so it is more clear that a new sentence is beginning.
And a thin space is inserted before each ‘?’ question-mark to help make clear that it is a question, with the intention of keeping the reader more alert, with

‘Figure 12.13’
Earlier textbooks placed diagrams anywhere and referred the reader to them via “See Fig 12.13” etc. This was unhelpful in 2 ways:
•	the reader has to break off reading to search for the relevant diagram, possibly losing their way,
•	the numbering was confusingly non-decimal, with Fig 12.9 being followed by Fig 12.10, etc.
In Physics for You all illustrations were carefully designed-in, so that they are adjacent to the relevant text.

Illustrations
In writing a science book there is often a battle between the artistry that the illustrator may wish to introduce and the scientific accuracy that the author requires. Some of the principles that were used in Physics for You were:
	Careful judgement as to whether a 2D or 3D illustration was more appropriate. 2D artwork is easier for a pupil to copy (if that is necessary); 3D artwork may give the reader a better appreciation of the apparatus and its scale.
	Several iterations of artwork editing and proofing to ensure scientific accuracy despite some illustrators adding ‘artistic’ touches.
	Label-lines never horizontal or vertical or at an angle where the reader might perceive the label-line to be part of the diagram itself. The label-line to end in a dot on the part of the diagram being labelled.
	Standard colours for some items. eg. all magnets were a standard ‘pantone’ pale purple for easy recognition.
	In addition to these illustrations in the text, each of the 38 chapter headings had a themed chapter title to set the scene:

People / faces / hands
To enhance the reader’s personal response to science, as well as personal pronouns in the text (see above), the illustrations included where possible:
	People, or at least hands, rather than disembodied apparatus shown in earlier textbooks, with
	hands or faces of suntanned colour, not white/pink, to be more acceptable to different ethnic groups, and
	for situations involving people, hand-drawn artwork with texture, not the crude bland computer-drawn artwork seen so often now.
Research by Keith Johnson [8] [9] showed that many textbooks did not pay much (or any) attention to this personal aspect of a reader’s interaction with a text.

Limericks, jokes, rhymes	A railway mechanic was sent To lay down some track across Kent, He forgot to design Some gaps in the line, And when it got hot, it went bent.
Another novel feature of Physics for You was the inclusion of jokes, limericks and other rhymes. The jokes are ‘corny’ but have a humorous relevance to the topic, as do the limericks [17] :

References
[1]	Institute of Physics : Physics Education, Vol 13, 1978, 327
[2]	Institute of Physics : Physics Education, Vol 14, 1979
[3]	Times Educational Supplement, 21 March 1997, 31
[4]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/4Uscreensavers.html
[5]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/4u-letters.html
[6]	Association for Science Education : School Science Review, Vol 60, 1978, No 210, 192
[7]	Association for Science Education : School Science Review, Vol 61, 1979, No 214, 188
[8]	https://www.timetabler.com/textbooks.html
[9]	https://www.timetabler.com/Readability & Books.pdf
[10]	https://www.timetabler.com/reading.html
[11]	https://www.timetabler.com/readable.pdf
[12]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/4U-ReadabilityArticle-No1.html
[13]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/4U-ReadabilityArticle–No2.html
[14]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/powerpoints/Revision Technique.ppt
[15]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/A4 sheet about RevisionTechnique.pdf
[16]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/A4 sheet about ExaminationTechnique.pdf
[17]	https://www.timetabler.com/physics4u/Limericks-4U.html

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