No, You Still Shouldn’t Put Two Spaces After the Period Has Expired.
“Hooray!” tweets Nicholas A. Christakis, a sociologist at Yale University. “Science confirms my long-standing practice, which I learned when I was 12, of using TWO SPACES after a period in a text. NOT ONE SPACE “.
He then refers to a scientific study: “Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing between periods and commas while reading, “ which does not” confirm “this practice. Here’s how to spot Dr. Christakis’ lies.
First, a little background. The war between single and double spacers, like any war without consequences , is fought hard. This is the topic that Slate authors spend 1,300 words on . Every slightly boring blog will discuss this eventually. The Mel Magazine headline reads, “For the love of God, stop putting two spaces after the period.” The headline of the cult of pedagogy reads: “Nothing says 40 like two gaps after a period!” The career counselor even suggested that two periods on a resume could cause age discrimination .
The two separators state that the extra space after each sentence makes the paragraphs easier to read. A single-delimited counter suggests that it only makes sense on typewriters that give equal space for each character, unlike typewriters and computer fonts. In the era of typewriters, text seemed oddly stretched out, and the extra space over time neutralized that oddity. (This is why double spacers tend to be older; they’ve learned to write on a typewriter rather than a computer. Baby Boomers, as always, think their opinion is mainstream.)
Now, two spaces is conducting a new study in which college students read passages of text with one space after each period, or two spaces. Research seems to indicate that using two spaces increases reading speed. But that claim doesn’t hold water if you study the study:
The study used Courier New
This is already a turning point. Courier New is a monospaced font (technically a typeface ) that mimics a typewriter. All characters are the same width: the letter i takes up the same amount of space as the letter m . In a monospaced font, iiiiii and mmmmmm are the same length. (As you can see, this is not the case in a typical proportionally spaced typeface.)
You see monospaced fonts in scripts, at a DOS prompt, or in computer code, in all concrete forms of data that aren’t structured like paragraphs of prose. You rarely see them on blogs, news sites, email, text messages, or chat rooms. That is, most of us rarely read anything in monospaced format.
This alone makes the test useless. Uniprocessors already agree that typewriters and monospaced fonts use two spaces after a period (except for some writers who use one space ). But reading proportional and monospaced are two very different scenarios. The study even admits this: “It is possible that the effects of punctuation spacing observed in the current experiment may be different when presented in different font conditions.” Of course it is possible – that is what it is about! Why use Courier New!
By email, study co-author Dr. Rebecca L. Johnson explains why: She says this is the standard for eye tracking tests because other text spacing tests have found no significant difference between reading monospaced and reading proportional fonts. She also dispelled a myth common among unit spacers:
Unless you’re using a real typing system (like TeX), modern word processing systems (like Word, OpenOffice, etc.) allocate the same amount of space (in pixels) between words as between sentences, even when using proportional fonts. …
Of course, the most educated single spacer specialists know that is not the case; the point of double spacing is to compensate for how strange and awkward monospace type looks. It’s about aesthetics. Reading speed is just an excuse used by double spacers like the American Psychological Association (more on that later).
There were 60 participants in total
And they are all students of Skidmore College, an elementary school built in the Shire of Middle-earth:
Unsurprisingly, the only known study of period spacing is a small test with just 60 college students. The interval between periods is not a matter of a lifetime, and the actual consequences are rounded to zero (which is why everyone’s opinion is so important). But this is still a small sample size that does not reflect the wide audience of readers. The Exploration Guides don’t pretend to have built the perfect microcosm of the English-speaking world here – so don’t flaunt their research to justify your indulgent extra space, degenerate double spacers.
This was not a typical reading experience.
Students were required to sit in special clothing with forehead and chin rests to restrict head movement so that their eye movements could be measured. The lines of the letter were four times separated. The only thing people read this way is an eye diagram.
We realized that this was an eye movement study, not just some kind of survey in which students pretend they can read quickly. And, apparently, this is the standard procedure for modern reading and comprehension tests, where the emphasis is on careful eye tracking.
But – and this is our highly unscientific assumption – the effect of double or single spaces may be somewhat obscured by the fact that you glance around, look for the next line without being able to move your head! Think about it before quoting this study –double –spaced zookie and butter!
The results were scanty
With the most liberal interpretation of the research results, in a world where everyone used two spaces after a period, reading speed would increase by … 3%. And that is if we could rely on the results of 21 Skidmore students who are already used to using two spaces after the period. Can such students be trusted? How does anyone under 22 who puts two spaces after a period even sneak into the test site?
Be that as it may , in a study of 39 students who usually enter one space after a period, they read a text that consists of one space about 1% faster. Thus, for 60 students as a whole, the dot spacing did not even change the average reading speed, except for a little statistical noise. (Reading comprehension remained the same for both single and double spacers.)
There may be a real difference that a larger study will reveal, but this whole study only hints that any difference is not big enough to affect everyone in any reading situation. This is not nonsense! It’s just a limited takeaway from a limited study that no one should tweet like it’s a damn Milgram experiment.
So we’re back to discussing aesthetics and tradition. Except for those who have to write the American Psychological Association’s style guide, which changed the recommendation from one place to two in 2010, which inspired this study. Dr Johnson explains to Lifehacker: “The only explanation the APA leadership gave was that it” improved the readability of the text, “but there were no references to support this claim.” She was unable to find research to support the decision of the scientific organization, so she conducted her own.
Surprisingly, Skidmore’s article was printed with one space after each period, but Dr. Johnson used two spaces in her email (which was very noticeable and looked odd). Maybe she and her co-authors are playing both sides; their article ends by putting everything in perspective:
While dot spacing does affect our text processing, we should probably argue passionately about things that are more important.
How dare they.
Update 05/01 at 2:30 pm ET: Dr. Johnson explains that she and her colleagues submitted their APA paper with two spaces after periods, but that Attention, Perception and Psychophysics was edited to one place. Is this the spark that ignites the powder keg of war? Yes.