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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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(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.