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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 11 2018, @08:44PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday May 11 2018, @08:44PM (#678563) Journal

    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.

    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.
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