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posted by
Fnord666
on Friday May 11 2018, @12:26PM
from the BBC-thinks-it's-a-paragraph-break-after-a-period dept.
from the BBC-thinks-it's-a-paragraph-break-after-a-period dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
In what may be one of the most controversial studies of the year, researchers at Skidmore College—clearly triggered by a change in the American Psychological Association (APA) style book—sought to quantify the benefits of two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. After conducting an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students, Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay L. Schmitt found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading. The research was trumpeted by some press outlets as a vindication of two-spacers' superiority.
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Two Spaces After Period Are Better Than One, Except Maybe They Aren't, Study Finds
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Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday May 11 2018, @01:19PM (14 children)
Yes, we'd like to think so, wouldn't we.
Sadly, working out what constitutes a sentence is something we imagine is easy but turns out to be very much harder in practice. The canonical stumbling block are abbreviations, such as "M. Lentilla" - one sentence, or two?
Or, to put it another way, your word processor might well be smart enough to put the correct horizontal gap after sentences - but it can only do that if it can correctly identify sentences. Ergo, use two spaces - and now there's no confusion.
Oh - and one more dot-point for two-space advocacy... if; let's say; my publisher demands "single spacing". No problem - that's a mundane search-and-replace. Going the other way; from one space to two; requires manual confirmation for each replacement.
(Score: 5, Informative) by zocalo on Friday May 11 2018, @01:54PM
No, it ideally requires RegExp support: s/([list chars needing two spaces] )/\1 /, or just working through the limited subset of characters that are required to have two spaces and adding one in, then going back through and checking for instances where a single space is required like abbreviations; tedious, but not as bad as a Y/N on every single space. Either way (insertion or deletion of spaces), you're *still* going to need to do a sanity check to make sure you haven't got any errors like the writer had mixed use of single/double spaces, or ($deity forbid) had used spaces as padding for layout purposes, in which case the swift application of a LART is highly recommended.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:02PM (6 children)
In the absence of accurate natural language processing by the computer, the only feasible solution is to have the user specify which type of space is desired.
For example, TeX does it by using different macros for end-of-sentence versus abbreviations. The vast majority of period-space sequences in English end sentences so this is the default. You can write "M.\ Lentilla" (this inserts a non-breaking space) which is usually correct, or M.~Lentilla if the situation calls for a breaking space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:17PM (4 children)
> You can write "M.\ Lentilla" (this inserts a non-breaking space) which is usually correct, or M.~Lentilla if the situation calls for a breaking space.
It's the opposite, "~" is the non-breaking space.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:52PM (3 children)
Let me ask the TeX experts. What do you do if you want your document to contain a symmetrical double quote? Like the ASCII double quote. TeX seems to convert them to an asymmetrical one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @03:49PM
Search around for TeX "straight quotes" or "dumb quotes". I got a few results, but there doesn't seem to be a "canonical" way, everyone seems to have their own, and it's always clumsy to use and/or has some caveats. The best I've seen seems to be the macro "\textquotedbl", but the required includes mess with some other stuff.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday May 11 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:52PM
That is the preferred way to get asymmetrical, "smart" quotes, literally the opposite of what GP asked for :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday May 11 2018, @05:35PM
That's way easier than just hitting the biggest button on the keyboard twice!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 11 2018, @02:49PM (2 children)
I wonder whether the tendency of people to drop the last period in acronyms (A.P.A) is related to this? Or if it's just a stylistic thing that artists like to put on album covers and the mimics can't be bothered to do it the right way.
And then there's the whole double period thing, too. No, not an ellipsis: *two* periods at the end of a sentence. Just an online thing with the young'uns, I think.. Of course it's totally impossible to do a search on it to figure out whether it's supposed to mean something, but I heard somewhere that it's supposed to indicate that the sentence is particularly insightful and worthy of attention? Typical self-centered overly-confident millennial thing, maybe.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:24PM (1 child)
And then there's the whole double period thing, too. No, not an ellipsis: *two* periods at the end of a sentence.
It's probably just laziness and/or a typographical error, exacerbated by the input method (a tactile feedback-less touchscreen, rather than some kind of key).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by danmars on Friday May 11 2018, @08:39PM
On a lot of soft keyboards, hitting space twice (which is easy to do by accident on a touchscreen) will give period + space. So they could have accidentally hit period-space-space instead of period-space and gotten an extra period that way.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 11 2018, @04:25PM
See? Function overloading is bad! English uses the same symbol for ending a sentence and (in America) for separating the fractional part from the whole part of a decimal number, and for abbreviations and ellipses.
ASCII mostly copied typewriters, which overloaded symbols everywhere possible. Old mechanical typewriters are worse than ASCII. Often did not have a '1' key. You were supposed to use small 'l' for a '1'. Seems Unicode has plenty of room for distinctive dots, but a quick look didn't turn up much.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday May 11 2018, @05:05PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @06:01PM
Gmail is my word processor. Automatic backup, spelling check and versioning. It's very light weight, responsive and available from most any device. When I'm done I cut and paste into to wysiwyg formatting software de jure, run a few macros and I'm done.