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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @09:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @09:24PM (#678571)

    "The real question to me is: What is the harm with two spaces?"

    I live and work in Japan, and Japanese text doesn't uses spaces at all. Every now and then a colleague will ask me to check their English, and in their Word document there will be a random mix of zero(!), one, or two spaces after sentences. Therefore, I mostly see two spaces used not as a rule, but as a mistake - as in, most sentences will have one space after them, and sometimes a typing mistake or editing will leave in an extra space, or lose the spaces altogether. They just don't notice, so when I move the cursor and delete extra spaces they're always amazed I even saw that.

    I'd bet that there are a lot of non-techie people in the west with the same problem of inconsistency, and it's very noticeable in WYSIWYG editors. Really, HTML and LaTeX ignoring extraneous whitespace is a blessing.