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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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