
A new study of the rules of spacing in English sentences - DanBC
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/04/one-space-between-each-sentence-they-said-science-just-proved-them-wrong-2/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a66d492d6f97
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jdietrich
_> Actually, Lifehacker's one-space purist Nick Douglas pointed out some
important caveats to the study's conclusion.

> Most notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in Courier New, a fixed-
> width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern
> computers.

> Johnson, one of the authors, told Douglas that the fixed-width font was
> standard for eye-tracking tests, and the benefits of two-spacing should
> carry over to any modern font._

I'd be annoyed at the overblown headline, the dubious methodology and the
completely baseless extrapolation made by the authors, but I'm just
embarrassed for everyone involved.

~~~
SeanLuke
The fixed-width revelation was pretty shocking. It takes a lot of guts to
admit, mid-article, that your entire article is nonsense; and then keep
writing. How could the Washington Post print this?

~~~
dingo_bat
> How could the Washington Post print this?

Washington Post has consistently shown their standards for journalism to be
below the worst in the world. Even Al Jazeera is better. So I don't see any
reason to be surprised. At least TFA was honest about the caveats.

~~~
SeanLuke
> below the worst in the world

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And this is a _most_
extraordinary claim.

Ridiculous bombast aside about an internationally recognized journalism
outfit: you can't be "below the worst" thing.

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Aardwolf
> “You can have my double space when you pry it from my cold, dead hands,”
> Megan McArdle wrote

Here's another typography rule that could go away imho: the comma obviously
belongs outside of the quotes, not inside of it. Megan McArdle did not write
that last comma so it belongs after the quote

Apparently the weird rule has something to do with metal pieces of printing
presses in the 19th century. Well, we're 2018 now and printing presses can
handle it outside of the quotes just fine.

UK does it fine apparently. Sometimes it seems as if the US actually prefers
to use inconsistent things like date formats where the numbers are not ordered
from biggest to smallest or smallest to biggest, length units with various
differing multiplication factors or those commas inside of quotes here :p

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hprotagonist
The true answer, as far as i can tell:

\- monospace font: two spaces.

\- proportional font: “space” is a lie, let your typesetter figure it out.

LaTeX forces option two: white space between sentences is completely ignored
in a paragraph block when the document is rendered. (and thus should be two
spaces since most people edit latex in a monospace font).

~~~
wck0
I tend to use new lines between my sentences in LaTeX. It makes it easier for
me to do editing.

Two new lines between paragraphs.

~~~
peatmoss
Another benefit of your approach is that it plays very well with revision
control.

~~~
btrettel
How is it better than using one or more spaces between sentences?

~~~
hprotagonist
line diffs are easier to think about, i suppose.

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smallduck
Certainly true that more horizontal spacing between sentences is good for
readability. Certainly false that hitting the spacebar twice, like a caveman,
is the way to achieve this.

~~~
grkvlt
Exactly. A good typesetting system will leave more inter-sentence space than
inter-word spacing, but this has nothing to do with the number of ASCII 0x20
symbols after the full stop (period) at the end of the sentence.

~~~
bhaak
But what typesetting system has a way of marking up sentence endings? Because
you can rely on the period being that as e.g. this sentence has one in the
middle of the sentence.

~~~
nokcha
LaTeX does. The general rule it uses is that a period followed by a space
marks the end of a sentence. To mark an intra-sentence period, a backslash is
used between the period and the space.

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yosito
Browsers naturally collapse more than one space in text, so even if the markup
contains multiple spaces, only one will be displayed. Whether the conclusion
is valid or not, this study and the corresponding article are going to be the
cause of a lot of "bike-shedding" and time wasting between web developers and
clients.

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3131s
English text would be slightly more machine-readable (sentence segmentation)
if everyone followed the period + two spaces approach, but alas. I personally
think it looks better.

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kazinator
Article fails to distinguish between the markup and typeset output. I don't
actually want to _type_ two space characters, but that has nothing to do with
how I want the typeset output to look.

~~~
bradknowles
Except I want the text to be maximally readable to me while I’m writing it, so
I will put them in and let the publishing system deal with it for final copy.

~~~
kazinator
Surely, that's a job for WYSIWYG [1982].

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badprose
> Douglas found more solace in the fact that the benefits of two-spacing, as
> described in the study, appear to be very minor.

Speaking of which, did we ever learn how many angels can dance on the head of
a pin?

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foreigner
> Note: An earlier version of this story published incorrectly because,
> seriously, putting two spaces in the headline broke the web code.

~~~
yorwba
Instead, the title uses a single _em quad_ Unicode character, U+2003 ( )

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superplussed
I didn't even realize the act of adding single spaces after a period was a
thing until a month ago, when a (younger) coworker pointed it out. But man, is
it a hard habit to break. (Just looked up and noticed double spacing after
periods within this text)

~~~
kalleboo
I knew it was a thing, but I thought it was something only taught to people
who learned to type on actual typewriters.

HTML will strip the extra space out, and most mobile operating systems default
to double space mapping to space+period.

~~~
Bedon292
I had an English teacher that made us do it in the early 2000s. I think its
because she learned on the actual typewriter. It never stuck though. We all
just went through and added the extra spaces at the end.

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rvern
Matthew Butterick wrote a response to this study last week:
[https://practicaltypography.com/are-two-spaces-better-
than-o...](https://practicaltypography.com/are-two-spaces-better-than-
one.html).

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iliaznk
Nice usage of fonts in the beginning of the article.

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ordu
Science didn't prove anything, it just shown correlation between personal
preference and speed of reading.

How this association was built? Where is the cause of this correlation? Why
people preferring two-spaces are worse at reading one-space after period? Do
they worse than one-spacers at other visual cognition tasks? Do they better
understand spoken language with increased pauses between sentences?

One can ask tenth of questions, trying to make sense of this findings. This
research gives us a bit of scientific data, but the bit is too small to jump
to conclusions.

~~~
dozzie
> Why people preferring two-spaces are worse at reading one-space after
> period?

And: are people from countries where typographic conventions say "one space"
worse or better at reading?

~~~
pmontra
In Italy we use a single space and all is well. I know the style guide for
English is to use two spaces but I confess that I never followed the
recommendation. I don't notice any difference, only the inconvenience of
typing an extra character, but I'm trained to read single spaces.

