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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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A visit to a strange place will bring fresh work.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 11 2018, @05:44PM (3 children)
I heard a radio talk show host use almost those same words this morning. They were chatting back and forth, when the gay DJ mentioned that this is the 50th (or maybe the 60th) anniversary of "The Pill" - aka contraceptive pill. The loud guy who talks over his fellow hosts all the time made some inane comment, when the gay guy asks, "Are you sure that you had NOTHING to do with the invention of The Pill?" All four of them launched into a debate about what horrible babies they all were, and that they probably did inspire the invention and the legalization of The Pill. Errr - actually, I think it was just three of them. I can't remember the black guy saying anything - he just kept out of that one.
On topic - my typing experience is much the same as yours. I took a year of typing in high school, because I had an empty period to fill. Can't remember what my choices were, but they were limited. I thought typing was probably the most useful thing I could do with 45 minutes, three days a week, for a whole school year. And, yes, double space after a sentence.
For what it's worth, the advanced typing classes had IBM electric typewriters. (Not sure if they were called Selectric, seems they may have been.) Beginner's class had old Underwood manual machines. I think the last of the Underwoods were scrapped two years after my abuse of them, and beginners got the hand-me-down IBM's when advanced class got newer Selectrics. I finally got access to a Selectric II, then a Selectric III in the Navy. Most people today probably can't even envision "carriage return" because they've never seen a carriage!
Interesting page to pick up some trivia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter [wikipedia.org] The Selectric was introduced in 1961, so I guess the IBM's in advanced classes in 1971-72 school year were probably Selectrics.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday May 11 2018, @07:44PM (2 children)
This actually might explain a lot.
Back to the typing subject, I do recall that in my high school typing class, the right side of the room had "Elite" typewriters, and our formatting math was based on a 96-character width line, and the left side of the room, who had to make do with "Pico" typewriters that could only squeeze a paltry 80 characters into their line of text. Elite or Pico, they were all manual typewriters, nothing electric, I think because the general feeling was that we should learn on "real" typewriters so that we could type on real manual ones as well as on the electric versions.
Both sides of the room learned two spaces after sentence-ending punctuation as dogma, not as a way to accomplish anything in particular such as approximate spacing between sentences used by professional printing equipment. They could have taught one space, or four, and it wouldn't have mattered much, but two it was. As a result of this convention, I notice that I have picked up cues as to whether a period is sentence-ending or something else such as abbreviation-ending by the amount of space following it. Habits like that make me prefer two-spacing when reading monotype-formatted text.
Meanwhile, our old Underwood manual typewriter at home was all uppercase, with no "1" or "0" keys (you were expected to use uppercase "i" and "o" for those).
Somehow, in spite of all this, I learned to type, picking up the two-space habit under discussion here.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 11 2018, @08:44PM
Ah, that explains why my first printer (nine needle) had a "Pica" and an "Elite" mode (you can guess how many letters fir into one line for each mode). Before your comment, I never could make any sense of those names (and yes, these days I could have looked it up in the internet, but that was in the 80s when I didn't even have access to the internet, and later the question were no longer in my mind).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 12 2018, @02:24AM
Heh - you reminded me of an early experience with a Selectric. The military has it's own conventions, of course. I couldn't figure out why my typewriter had only upper case letters, numerals, and some characters not found on typical typewriters. I had to ask the disbursing clerk who shared my little cubby-hole office what was going on. He showed me the little case containing all the different heads, showed me how to change the head, and gave a quick explanation when and how to use some of the heads. I found myself using that all caps head eventually, but most of my work required more "traditional" type heads.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC