It was Mr Chen Jiageng who first put forward the horizontal writing of Chinese characters. 1950 In June, at the second session of the first session of the China People's Political Consultative Conference, Chen Jiageng formally proposed to the General Assembly that Chinese writing should be written horizontally from left to right. 1 95565438+1October1day, Guangming Daily changed the vertical layout from top to bottom to horizontal layout for the first time, and published an article entitled "Tell readers horizontally for this newspaper": "We believe that the layout of modern China newspapers and books should change with the development of modern culture and its needs, and should also change with people's living habits. The horizontal writing of Chinese characters is a development trend. " Guo Moruo, Hu Yuzhi and other famous scholars also quickly wrote articles pointing out the scientific nature of horizontal writing, saying that people's eyes are horizontal, and their eyes are wider when viewed horizontally than vertically. When reading, the eyes and head rotate less, which is natural and labor-saving and not easy to get tired. It is also convenient to write various mathematical, logical and cultural formulas and foreign place names, and it can also improve the utilization rate of paper. After Guangming Daily took the lead in practice, by June 1955 1 1, 17, the central newspaper had been changed to horizontal edition. 1956 65438+ 10/month 1, People's Daily has also been changed to a horizontal version, so far, the whole country has responded.
Reading from vertical to horizontal is a great change in the writing style of Chinese characters. Someone specially did a special experiment: Top students in Grade Three 10 were selected and divided into two groups, male and female, and they were asked to read lyric essays carefully selected from the same China Youth Daily. Results The gap is obvious: the reading speed of horizontal typesetting is 1.345 times that of vertical typesetting. Someone joked that I didn't know my eyes were long and horizontal until Chinese characters were changed to horizontal writing. Others ridiculed that the western characters were written horizontally, and the readers shook their heads while reading, meaning "no, no, no, that's not true!" " Therefore, there is an innovative consciousness of denying predecessors and creating new schemes; China's ancient prose is written vertically, and the reader nods while reading it, meaning "Yes, yes, that's it!" Therefore, there is a conservative consciousness of superstitious predecessors.