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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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And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.
-- Isaiah 56:12, New Standard Version
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday May 11 2018, @01:53PM (23 children)
I learned to type decades ago in high school. Coincidentally, right when I got my first access to a computer about the time BYTE magazine got started. What perfect timing to be enrolled in Typing 1.
After the first six weeks, I knew all I needed for the rest of my life! Everything else in the class was about the proper form for various kinds of business letters, reports, etc. Boring, but still provided dedicated time each day to practice typing.
One of the most basic habits that was ingrained was two spaces after a period. And I don't think this was just my typing class or my school.
I think the one or two spaces thing becomes deeply ingrained early on. It is absolutely reflex to type two spaces after the end of a sentence. So much so that I often backspace both spaces to begin a new paragraph.
I don't know where the one-space convention started. but I suspect such an obscene practice originates with the same class of people who don't use punctuation or end sentences they probably also don't use capitalization to start new sentences they leave it to the reader to parse where sentences begin and end furthermore I suspect these are the same unwashed heathens who don't want semicolons at the end of programming statements as God intended I have not looked up which verse that's in they might even ironically be close relatives of those who prefer spaces instead of tabs yet wont type two spaces between sentences
After decades of typing, you, like I are probably a very fast typist. Surprisingly fast, in fact. If you try it, you might astonish yourself and your friends. But with a few errors, more than you'd like because the computer age removed the huge penalty associated with a single typo.
I've finally got the first laptop I've used with such a great keyboard that I can blindly type at very high speed.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 11 2018, @01:56PM (3 children)
ANYGOODCRYPTOGRAPHERKNOWSTHATPUNCTUATIONSPACESANDLETTERCASEARESUPERFLUOUSTOUNDERSTANDINGOFTHEMESSAGE
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @04:46PM (2 children)
Try to explain that to a python programmer.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 11 2018, @08:33PM (1 child)
Or any programmer of a modern language. If you want a language that ignores space characters outside character/string constants, you need to write FORTRAN. Where instead of
you can write
ad instead of
you can write
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 14 2018, @03:51PM
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:04PM (10 children)
I guess, in countries where the two-space convention was never ever used to begin with.
I mean, just because it was the usual thing to do in your country doesn't mean it is the one and only thing to do worldwide.
Also, it is sort of pointless if you are using any system that does the spacing for you (like LaTeX or HTML). Your text will look exactly the same, no matter how many space characters you type. Often those systems will have another way to tell them what spacing to use (note that in LaTeX you have to do something special if your point does not end a sentence!).
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday May 11 2018, @02:19PM (9 children)
Why does HTML ignore side-by-side spaces when it doesn't ignore side-by-side anything else? I can type ttt, or ***, [[[, I can even escape it all /[/[/[ and it shows what is there, but spaces get treated differently?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday May 11 2018, @02:20PM
oops on the escape, LOL. Still drinking coffee.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Friday May 11 2018, @02:28PM (1 child)
In HTML, spaces and certain other characters are treated as "whitespace" which is a single thing.
but what happens if I have whitespace on a dark themed web page?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday May 11 2018, @10:41PM
Meh -- I think it's just a lazy way to deal with a line wrap between two space characters so the first line doesn't start with a space. I can understand why whitespace can be important in a command, script, or program -- but in the output?? That feels lazy.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @03:05PM (4 children)
Sometimes, with HTML, you have to do things that look odd. That is, until they are rendered. Then, they look normal. Well, normal-ish.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday May 11 2018, @04:29PM
No kidding.
.
It's ridiculous having to put in other characters to get the spacing I want between lines.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
Careful with those , they can lead to odd line wrapping.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @09:05PM
Took me a ridiculously long time (like, 10~15 years) to realize that is not just a "space", but a "non-breaking space". Heh. Of course, I only occasionally dabbled in some HTML, but still.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday May 11 2018, @10:43PM
Sure -- but typing out an HTML character code is not the same as hitting the spacebar twice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:08PM
Because it was authored by hand and that required it to be readable. One line of 999999 characters long isn't quite as readable. And even in case of generated HTML there are still whitespaces floating around.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by isj on Friday May 11 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)
I would reverse the question: Where did the two-space convention start?
My guess is it is due a difference in typography and other conventions. European newspapers _generally_ dont change the spacing between letters in words in order to avoid changing the shape of the words. That means that with right-justified margin the inter-word spacing varies, and two-spaces-after-period has no advantage. Differenes in the typeface used, eg. the embedded spacing in a period could also have an influence. Or perhaps the frequency of periods used for abbreviations.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:33PM
I would reverse the question: Where did the two-space convention start?
It started with the popular usage of the typewriter. In professional typesetting before that, typesetters (like the people who typeset books for printing) put in extra space between sentences for readability. It wasn't "one space" or "two spaces", because each letter had different spacing (kerning) and things were variable, but it was more space than that between words. Then, along came the typewriter, so to approximate this, professional typists (at least in the English-speaking world) came up with the two-space convention, since typewriters had monospaced characters.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 11 2018, @04:37PM
I'll take a guess that the two space convention predates using computers for text. The convention originates in an ancient dark time of pain and anguish when people used typewriters.
Ancient typewriters were monospace. I'll suppose the two space convention is a result.
I'm not against single space (really), but there is no way I'm going to un-learn two-space. For monospace, I still prefer the two-space convention.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @04:24PM
Coders that prefer tabs should themselves be marinated within a giant vat of Tab soda. Disco music should be turned up to 11 and they should be left to contemplate their sin.
But otherwise spot on.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 11 2018, @05:44PM (3 children)
I heard a radio talk show host use almost those same words this morning. They were chatting back and forth, when the gay DJ mentioned that this is the 50th (or maybe the 60th) anniversary of "The Pill" - aka contraceptive pill. The loud guy who talks over his fellow hosts all the time made some inane comment, when the gay guy asks, "Are you sure that you had NOTHING to do with the invention of The Pill?" All four of them launched into a debate about what horrible babies they all were, and that they probably did inspire the invention and the legalization of The Pill. Errr - actually, I think it was just three of them. I can't remember the black guy saying anything - he just kept out of that one.
On topic - my typing experience is much the same as yours. I took a year of typing in high school, because I had an empty period to fill. Can't remember what my choices were, but they were limited. I thought typing was probably the most useful thing I could do with 45 minutes, three days a week, for a whole school year. And, yes, double space after a sentence.
For what it's worth, the advanced typing classes had IBM electric typewriters. (Not sure if they were called Selectric, seems they may have been.) Beginner's class had old Underwood manual machines. I think the last of the Underwoods were scrapped two years after my abuse of them, and beginners got the hand-me-down IBM's when advanced class got newer Selectrics. I finally got access to a Selectric II, then a Selectric III in the Navy. Most people today probably can't even envision "carriage return" because they've never seen a carriage!
Interesting page to pick up some trivia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter [wikipedia.org] The Selectric was introduced in 1961, so I guess the IBM's in advanced classes in 1971-72 school year were probably Selectrics.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @07:44PM (2 children)
This actually might explain a lot.
Back to the typing subject, I do recall that in my high school typing class, the right side of the room had "Elite" typewriters, and our formatting math was based on a 96-character width line, and the left side of the room, who had to make do with "Pico" typewriters that could only squeeze a paltry 80 characters into their line of text. Elite or Pico, they were all manual typewriters, nothing electric, I think because the general feeling was that we should learn on "real" typewriters so that we could type on real manual ones as well as on the electric versions.
Both sides of the room learned two spaces after sentence-ending punctuation as dogma, not as a way to accomplish anything in particular such as approximate spacing between sentences used by professional printing equipment. They could have taught one space, or four, and it wouldn't have mattered much, but two it was. As a result of this convention, I notice that I have picked up cues as to whether a period is sentence-ending or something else such as abbreviation-ending by the amount of space following it. Habits like that make me prefer two-spacing when reading monotype-formatted text.
Meanwhile, our old Underwood manual typewriter at home was all uppercase, with no "1" or "0" keys (you were expected to use uppercase "i" and "o" for those).
Somehow, in spite of all this, I learned to type, picking up the two-space habit under discussion here.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 11 2018, @08:44PM
Ah, that explains why my first printer (nine needle) had a "Pica" and an "Elite" mode (you can guess how many letters fir into one line for each mode). Before your comment, I never could make any sense of those names (and yes, these days I could have looked it up in the internet, but that was in the 80s when I didn't even have access to the internet, and later the question were no longer in my mind).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 12 2018, @02:24AM
Heh - you reminded me of an early experience with a Selectric. The military has it's own conventions, of course. I couldn't figure out why my typewriter had only upper case letters, numerals, and some characters not found on typical typewriters. I had to ask the disbursing clerk who shared my little cubby-hole office what was going on. He showed me the little case containing all the different heads, showed me how to change the head, and gave a quick explanation when and how to use some of the heads. I found myself using that all caps head eventually, but most of my work required more "traditional" type heads.