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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.

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/


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday May 11 2018, @04:28PM (#678448)

    Studies like this are fine as long as they clearly state the limits of the study. No one uses monospace fonts these days, except maybe programmers or people writing simple text files, so it really isn't applicable. If they want to do a study using actual modern fonts, with actual modern software (which these days is largely something to do with HTML as another poster commented here), showing the actual effects and making recommendations for real-world use, that's fine, but it's just not what they did here. They did a study that is appropriate for people in 1970 using typewriters.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:59PM (#678568)

    > No one uses monospace fonts these days, except maybe programmers or people writing simple text files, so it really isn't applicable.

    I beg to differ [soylentnews.org] :P