A new study of the rules of spacing in English sentences | Hacker News Reader

A new study of the rules of spacing in English sentences

washingtonpost.com

37 pointsDanBC42 comments

> 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.

Sad. It “should carry over”. What a joke. You don’t have to guess. You can test it.

The most important part is that it was a test specifically for Courier New. That cannot be extrapolated to all other fonts. The author's claim that the benefits "should" carry over was not actually tested, and should have been.

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?

>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

> How could the Washington Post print this?

Because it's the Washington Post?

For a start: 'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-ne...

> 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.

> 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.

Ironically, WaPo's own introduction explains why the one-space convention only arose in a variable-width context. For the study to not test their findings with a variable-width font, seems pretty silly.

"Letters of uniform width looked cramped without extra space after the period. Typists learned not to do it.

But then, at the end of the 20th century, the typewriter gave way to the word processor, and the computer, and modern variable-width fonts. And the world divided.

Some insisted on keeping the two-space rule. They couldn't get used to seeing just one space after a period. It simply looked wrong.

Some said this was blasphemy. The designers of modern fonts had built the perfect amount of spacing, they said. Anything more than a single space between sentences was too much."

  > Reading speed only improved marginally, the paper found,
  > and only for the 21 "two-spacers,"
  > who naturally typed with two spaces between sentences.

That, my friend, is the clencher.

Fourteen paragraphs of introduction were bad enough. Then as you pointed out, the writer forgot the intro: that most people who argue for single-spacing do so only for variable-width typefaces.

What a failure of writing and thinking! It hurts more because it's in a big newspaper.

> “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

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).

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.

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

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

line diffs are easier to think about, i suppose.

When I learned to type, I learned the two space convention. Some years ago, while working together on a paper draft a friend of mine hooted and laughed at my antediluvian practice. When he was done, I explained that the paper was destined for LaTeX, and that any amount of space would be collapsed into Knuth Standard Spacing.

The joke was on my friend in the end, as I convinced him to learn LaTeX, which is the most useful cruelty one can inflict on someone else.

Normally, TeX uses a space and a third between sentences. But it's actually more complicated than that, because the amount of space can be stretched or shrunk to achieve text justification. More details are at: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4726

I edit code and latex in proportional fonts. When writing latex, I usually line break my sentences.

ack. how do you get your brackets to line up?

I don’t worry about that. ASCII art in code isn’t very satisfying anyways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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?

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

Instead, the title uses a single em quad Unicode character, U+2003 ( )

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)

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.

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.

I took "keyboarding" in high school on PS/2 computers with sweet, sweet Model M keyboards. That would have been late 1994/early 1995. We were taught to use two spaces.

Matthew Butterick wrote a response to this study last week: https://practicaltypography.com/are-two-spaces-better-than-o....

Nice usage of fonts in the beginning of the article.

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.

> 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?

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.

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