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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: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @12:45PM (33 children)
This study is garbage. They did the study using a monospaced font, and then just hand-waved at the end saying "well, it should apply to proportional fonts too". Bullshit.
The two-space thing only makes sense on monospaced fonts, and came about because typewriters were monospaced, unlike printing presses where the widths of characters and spaces between them were completely variable.
Now that our computers are able to have variable spacing (even with the same character, depending on what character it's adjacent to), the whole thing is useless: your word processor will automatically put the correct amount of space between two sentences (which is actually more than one space, and less than two).
If you're writing stuff in a monospaced text file and like two spaces better, go for it. If you're writing a professional document, using two spaces is obsolete and stupid and probably quite useless (many programs will simply ignore your extra space).
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Friday May 11 2018, @12:48PM
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @01:06PM (2 children)
I prefer newlines as sentence separators in my monospaced text files. Newlines make great separators after commas as well, especially when writing a lengthy subordinate clause. There again, I'm a LaTeX user.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:47PM
Putting frequent newlines in standard places (such as between sentences and around lengthy subordinate clauses) helps revision control make precision differences. Making the newline wait for a new paragraph makes it hard to see what actually changed in the paragraph, and makes merge conflicts more likely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @04:29PM
PDFs often have newlines between each word, or even within words.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday May 11 2018, @01:19PM (14 children)
Yes, we'd like to think so, wouldn't we.
Sadly, working out what constitutes a sentence is something we imagine is easy but turns out to be very much harder in practice. The canonical stumbling block are abbreviations, such as "M. Lentilla" - one sentence, or two?
Or, to put it another way, your word processor might well be smart enough to put the correct horizontal gap after sentences - but it can only do that if it can correctly identify sentences. Ergo, use two spaces - and now there's no confusion.
Oh - and one more dot-point for two-space advocacy... if; let's say; my publisher demands "single spacing". No problem - that's a mundane search-and-replace. Going the other way; from one space to two; requires manual confirmation for each replacement.
(Score: 5, Informative) by zocalo on Friday May 11 2018, @01:54PM
No, it ideally requires RegExp support: s/([list chars needing two spaces] )/\1 /, or just working through the limited subset of characters that are required to have two spaces and adding one in, then going back through and checking for instances where a single space is required like abbreviations; tedious, but not as bad as a Y/N on every single space. Either way (insertion or deletion of spaces), you're *still* going to need to do a sanity check to make sure you haven't got any errors like the writer had mixed use of single/double spaces, or ($deity forbid) had used spaces as padding for layout purposes, in which case the swift application of a LART is highly recommended.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:02PM (6 children)
In the absence of accurate natural language processing by the computer, the only feasible solution is to have the user specify which type of space is desired.
For example, TeX does it by using different macros for end-of-sentence versus abbreviations. The vast majority of period-space sequences in English end sentences so this is the default. You can write "M.\ Lentilla" (this inserts a non-breaking space) which is usually correct, or M.~Lentilla if the situation calls for a breaking space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @02:17PM (4 children)
> You can write "M.\ Lentilla" (this inserts a non-breaking space) which is usually correct, or M.~Lentilla if the situation calls for a breaking space.
It's the opposite, "~" is the non-breaking space.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 11 2018, @02:52PM (3 children)
Let me ask the TeX experts. What do you do if you want your document to contain a symmetrical double quote? Like the ASCII double quote. TeX seems to convert them to an asymmetrical one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @03:49PM
Search around for TeX "straight quotes" or "dumb quotes". I got a few results, but there doesn't seem to be a "canonical" way, everyone seems to have their own, and it's always clumsy to use and/or has some caveats. The best I've seen seems to be the macro "\textquotedbl", but the required includes mess with some other stuff.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday May 11 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:52PM
That is the preferred way to get asymmetrical, "smart" quotes, literally the opposite of what GP asked for :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday May 11 2018, @05:35PM
That's way easier than just hitting the biggest button on the keyboard twice!
(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.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 11 2018, @04:25PM
See? Function overloading is bad! English uses the same symbol for ending a sentence and (in America) for separating the fractional part from the whole part of a decimal number, and for abbreviations and ellipses.
ASCII mostly copied typewriters, which overloaded symbols everywhere possible. Old mechanical typewriters are worse than ASCII. Often did not have a '1' key. You were supposed to use small 'l' for a '1'. Seems Unicode has plenty of room for distinctive dots, but a quick look didn't turn up much.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday May 11 2018, @05:05PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @06:01PM
Gmail is my word processor. Automatic backup, spelling check and versioning. It's very light weight, responsive and available from most any device. When I'm done I cut and paste into to wysiwyg formatting software de jure, run a few macros and I'm done.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 11 2018, @01:28PM (5 children)
Agreed.
That's sort of true, but a bit misleading. Hand typesetting did use lots of different width spaces. But the general rule for roughly 300 years of typesetting (from the 1600s until mid-20th century) was that spaces after punctuation got bigger spaces, and spaces after periods got extra wide spaces. One can easily see this by looking at almost any printed matter from the early 20th century or before. Typewriters approximated that rule with a double or even triple space, but really the way it became a standard was in Monotype and Linotype operators back in the early days of mechanical typesetting (which didn't have the flexibility of spaces that hand typesetters had).
For a long detailed history of all this with historical citations of printing manuals, see here [archive.org].
This is all incorrect. Well, the fact that computers CAN do variable spacing IS correct. But there is no such thing as "correct amount of space" -- it's a stylistic choice that has varied over the centuries and by the typeface used. And to my knowledge the vast majority of professional proportional fonts that kern around periods actually REDUCE space, not add it. Unless you're using LaTeX with settings to add space after periods or something, most word processors and design software will use the font kerning settings, which will tend to reduce space after periods (if they modify it at all).
"Many programs" is sort of misleading. If you're doing HTML or variants of markup and that actually aren't WYSIWYG in text entry, you're correct. If you're using the sort of word processor that the vast majority of people actually use for basic formatting (e.g., Microsoft Word), it will definitely pay attention to your extra space.
As for whether it's "obsolete and stupid" -- that's a matter of opinion. Personally, for older "classic" typefaces, I like the look of slightly broader spaces after punctuation and even broader spaces after periods. But most word processors other than LaTeX don't do such things automatically. So, if you like that look but want a quick way to approximate it, two spaces isn't exactly a terrible way.
But it's ultimately a stylistic design choice that ideally should be made taking into account other design factors (typeface, leading, other font characteristics). Unfortunately computer typographers these days have mostly been brainwashed into believing that there's only one kind of space or even the myths you quote about programs mostly adding space for you... which you could verify they don't if you just look at the output of most applications.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @03:39PM (4 children)
I see, understand, and respect your position, but I am not sure I agree.
In about year 7 or 8 of his schooling (about age 13), my son performed a similarly rigorous experiment comparing the cleaning power of water+Tide(r) brand laundry detergent, water plus the "Miracle Washball" MLM-scam laundry device [greenfinder.com.au], and, as a control, plain water, comparing their cleaning power on identical cotton shirts stained with concord grape juice, chocolate, and mustard.
To quote from his epic report, "The Tide cleaned the best. The nothing came in second and the wash ball was last."
Now, while Tide isn't going to be calling us for permission to use the report in marketing materials, nor has he shaken up the scientific establishment, it's still important for him, and other kids like those at Skidmore with their one-space-two-space-red-space-blue-space experiment, to do these science fair projects and keep the idea of science alive.
The "study" isn't garbage so much as it is a chance to teach kids to seek evidence-based answers.
In a post-facts world where the leader of its most powerful country justifies unsupported beliefs by saying "many people agree with me and they're very smart people" [newrepublic.com], this is more important than ever.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 11 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
Well, I respect you, but honestly I'm not sure what to make of your opinion, which I think is likely uninformed in this case.
If this were an exploratory study in an area that no one had ever investigated empirically before, I might have a view similar to yours. However, that's not true. This is a well-studied area where I'm pretty sure there are at least several dozen previous studies on the topic of sentence spacing, reading speed, comprehension, etc. Many of those studies were poor and/or significantly flawed too. But the rigor with which this study was done was pretty atrocious compared to many previous efforts.
I'm not going to bother to critique the study, as a link in TFA already has a detailed critique [practicaltypography.com] already. And that's from someone who is sympathetic to the study's findings too.
The difference between your son's experiment and this one is that this one is being trumpeted as legitimate empirical research in a professional journal. And, as I said, it can't even get away with the "well, it's the first time someone tried doing this, so our conclusions may be preliminary" argument, as this is well-trodden ground.
The place for that is science-fair projects, not professional journals. I'm all for the kind of thing your son did, and I support kids doing stuff like this. But this is not a study for kids or by kids -- it's ADULT researchers who should know better. And it's ADULT journalists who are trumpeting this study to draw unsupported conclusions.
In a post-fact world, we should NEVER champion crappy science. Because you know who else champions crappy science? The President and his advisors!! They draw on "studies" that cherry-pick data deliberately, or even "studies" that come from a "faith-based" perspective or whatever. But then they throw out some numbers and "data" and suddenly it's supposed to look like "science."
That's NOT science -- that's voodoo dressing up as science. It's more important than ever these days to champion rigorous standards in science to differentiate the crappy studies that make headlines every day from good, legitimate research. One thing that's often forgotten these days is that stuff like Wikipedia's standards is what has led to our modern "fake news" era. Because it's not actually "post-fact" in some sense. It's possible, using the Wikipedia-like standard of "verifiability" to find facts that -- often taken out of context -- appear to support your position. But it's just as easy to construct a BS argument using such "verifiable facts" as it is to make stuff up.
At least the president is somewhat honest about his perspectives -- "I like this stuff because it agrees with what I think, and smart people agree with me." Yep -- that's nonsense, but it's just stating straight out that he doesn't give a crap about rigor. "Science" that dresses up BS conclusions in the veneer of math and respectibility is ten times more insidious and should be fought just as strongly.
I stand by the assessment of the GP I agreed with -- this study is garbage.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @07:24PM
I readily admit that this is so, and I believe that our areas of agreement vastly overshadow any minor areas of actual disagreement.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:28PM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @08:59PM
> 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
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 11 2018, @01:53PM (2 children)
Sounds like more study is needed. Who's ready to fund a multivariate examination of the topic: fixed vs. proportional, serif vs. sans, and a range of spaces between sentences between 0.5 and 3 in increments of 0.25?
In monospaced font, the period is already generously padded with space...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)
No, they really don't need any experiment. Professional typesetters have been putting extra space between sentences in books for literally *centuries* now. This two-space thing only came about because of typewriters in the 20th century. Well, no one uses typewriters any more, and only programmers use monospaced fonts (and not for writing full sentences usually either), so the whole thing is moot.
This is like doing a scientific study on whether a 1920 Ford Model T or a 1920 Oldsmobile (whatever) protects crash-test dummies better in a crash test. Who cares? They're both horrible compared to modern cars and no one drives those vehicles any more, so it just doesn't matter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 11 2018, @06:39PM
/s
Sorry, forgot.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @03:00PM (3 children)
In a very, very few contexts, hand-waving is a perfectly valid generalization technique. I think this is one of them.
Frankly, there is something like 90% of the population with no opinion or preference, and the other 10% is defined by one-spacers and two-spacers. You seem to be a one-spacer. I am a two-spacer*. I think there's room in the world for both of us. If either of us is uncomfortable with the spaceyness of a body of text, there is sed or search-and-replace. Many of the one-spacers and two-spacers get very emotional about their choices. I am happy to see some science, some facts, however meager, come into the discussion.
Many of the one-spacers and two-spacers get very emotional about their choices. I am happy to see some science, some facts, however meager, come into the discussion.
----------
* And I strongly prefer oxford commas because for me, they help resolve potential ambiguity, have the favor of a more lengthy tradition, and just plain look better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11 2018, @03:52PM
10% seems like a huge overstatement. It's probably more of a 1%, 0.1%, or even 0.01% range. Don't confuse "people on tech forums" with "general populace" :)
Anyway, I'm a non-religious one-spacer, but I completely agree with you on the Oxford comma.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 11 2018, @04:20PM
No, I'm not a one-spacer or a two-spacer. I made my position clear, but apparently most people are just too fucking stupid to understand anything besides being on Team A or Team B.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday May 12 2018, @12:03PM
They can as well introduce ambiguity.
Example: My brother, a farmer, and I were walking along the street.
How many people are walking? Is it two people (the first one being my brother, a farmer, and the second one being me)? Or is it three people (The first one being my brother, the second one being a farmer, and the third one being me)?
Now without Oxford comma: My brother, a farmer and I were walking along the street.
Here it's clear that it is three people walking, since if I wanted to say that my brother is a farmer, then another comma after "farmer" would have been mandatory.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Friday May 11 2018, @08:13PM
I was always taught to use 2 spaces after a period. (Yes, I am old... at least they were electric typewriters at the time...)
Ofc, I am a developer, including web development, and HTML ignores all extra whitespace. regardless of fixed or variable width fonts. The last time I read a newspaper or a book, a lot of those use justification with variable spacing to force both left and right borders which can alter spacing between letters as well as between words.
Regardless of whether or not you type a double space or not, most of the time it will not make a difference in the format that eventually is shown to the reader. The rare times that it is apparent are so infrequent, only the most anal people are going to notice and/or care. (Like the so called grammar nazis;and its not like anyone cares about their opinion.)
(Note: I realize that their are tags/styles that can force recognition of whitespace in HTML/CSS but I never use them myself, and rarely see them used by others.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P