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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: 5, Informative) by zocalo on Friday May 11 2018, @01:54PM

    by zocalo (302) on Friday May 11 2018, @01:54PM (#678363)

    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.

    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.

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