A post titled The Secret Lives of Fonts over at Fadtastic discusses an anecdotal study a student did by averaging the scores he got on papers based on the font they were submitted in. Out of 52 papers (admittedly a relatively small sample group), he found a very strong trend amongst the average scores:

Times New Roman: A-
Trebuchet MS: B-
Georgia: A

In the comments, a college professor writes in to mention that he requires his students to submit papers in a serif font, as he finds sans-serif fonts like Arial (and presumably Trebuchet MS) difficult to read. The author of the original piece also posits that Georgia is similar enough to the very common Times New Roman to be considered “safe”, but different enough to feel fresh.

I can see this having uses in the “real world”, where we want a certain visceral reaction to written communications, from technical specifications to resumes, to - of course - academic papers. Great stuff; I think there’s enough here to really warrant more study.

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