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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: 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.