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Two Spaces After Period Are Better Than One, Except Maybe They Aren't, Study Finds

posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 11 2018, @12:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the BBC-thinks-it's-a-paragraph-break-after-a-period dept.

MrPlow writes:

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.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/two-spaces-after-period-are-better-than-one-except-maybe-they-arent-study-finds/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by isj on Friday May 11 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)

    by isj (5249) on Friday May 11 2018, @03:11PM (#678411) Homepage

    I don't know where the one-space convention started

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:33PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday May 11 2018, @04:33PM (#678452)

    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

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 11 2018, @04:37PM (#678454) Journal

    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.

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