The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)(theatlantic.com) |
The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period (2018)(theatlantic.com) |
1 space after period
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I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone. It’s why I thought, for a long time, that I didn’t like books. I wasn’t good at the mechanics of reading. When I found text-to-speech programs and actual audiobooks, it was like finally seeing the turtle in one of those Magic Eye posters that everyone else at the party saw hours ago.
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I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone. It’s why I thought, for a long time, that I didn’t like books. I wasn’t good at the mechanics of reading. When I found text-to-speech programs and actual audiobooks, it was like finally seeing the turtle in one of those Magic Eye posters that everyone else at the party saw hours ago.
Even a period-space-capital method is far from foolproof, Mr. Anderson.
To me it causes some mild confusion (if that's the right word — maybe too strong a word) with paragraph breaks. It's just too big a gap. For me it decreases readability if anything.
... Andrew W. Kent ...
... Andrew W. Kent ...
Whitespace is frippery.
TeX/LaTeX attempts to do this, IIRC. I know there are sigils to force that one way or the other when it guesses wrong.
I'm a 2-spacer, being of a certain age and having learned to type in school on an actual typewriter. I'm also heavily invested in the Web, and I get that multiple spaces are folded into 1 on HTML. I still do 2.
Yes, from posts with double-spaces I can usually tell that the author is over a certain age (I would put them at baby-boomer or near baby-boomer).
I am guilty of having been taught that way when taking Typing class in school as well.
I have since dropped it though since we no longer live in a monospace world (I know, I hear you saying, "Speak for yourself," but I am excepting coding).
In the way that I read, I find that two spaces here highlights the first word(s) of the sentence, and that makes it much slower for me to parse the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
"I've written before about", "This", "This", "It's why I thought", "I", "When I found" - usually I want to skip over these words and get to the meaning: not have them be identified as a point of focus.
Extra space between sentences is standard in English typesetting (spacing in printed text is language-specific BTW) precisely for readability: it lets you, in general, read by sentence.
The problems with deferring it to presentation are 1 - "raw"=ish text often is the presentation (consider just long text in a code comment -- and almost anything in the terminal) and 2 - you don't always write in text that is undergoing any kind of presentation processing in realtime (e.g. you're writing TeX, or Markdown for that matter). You want to be able to read it easily.
The inverse is not a problem: a typesetting system can just coalesce spacing and make its own inter-sentence spacing decisions.
I understand the claim that two-spacing makes it easier to read because it separates sentences. But that is what the period does. Sentences are supposed to flow together.
Paragraphs are for separating.
And from the linked article:
“I’ve gotten a lot of flak for using a mono-spaced font (Courier New) in the study,” said Johnson.
Flak? I think using monospace font invalidates the conclusion of study.
Granted, there are overloading issues, but we have had decades to refine text layout engines to account for this. Major text layout systems, including those used in publishing, need to be able to dynamically adjust spacing based upon context. Software such as InDesign does this, and it is a standard part of workflow to replace all double-spaces with single-spaces.
College and Grad School either didn't care or vehemently adhered to 1 space.
APA Style and its variants seems reasonable to me, if only for the reason that it corrects a major flaw in AP - the lack of a serial comma.
From my perspective the very concept of a typewriter-style space is an abomination wrought upon printing by the typewriter. Of course, typewriters were tremendously useful devices. I have no quarrel with them other than that.
Spaces in the retro printer world: There's this concept of the "em" or quad space. It is a square hunk of metal the same height as the letters in the typeface. We still have it in   and css rules like line-height: 1.25em;
We had five kinds of space in the lower case of the typeface. The "case" was a tray with dividers. If I remember right, they were
-- em (quad)  
-- en (half a quad)  
-- thick ( ~ 1/4 of a quad) the ordinary space and in most fonts.
-- middle ( ~ 1/5 of a quad)  
-- thin ( ~ 1/6 of a quad in most typefaces)
-- numberspace (the same width as the numerals in the typeface, an early nod to <pre> for tables.
Notice that the precise widths of the thicks, middles, and thins are determined by the typeface's designer. Then and now.
Our teacher told us to set up body copy with thicks between words.
We then justified each line manually by putting two thins in place of a middle to add space, or one thin to remove space. Choosing where to adjust the space was an art. It was good to avoid rivers of space running down the page. (Adobe InDesign gives enough control to do this; I don't think other programs do.)
AFTER SENTENCES, we used ens for most copy, and ems for poetry and that sort of thing. I am pretty sure the two-space typewriter convention grew out of printers' ens or ems after sentences.
In the 21st century digital typefaces have contextual glyphs. That makes it easy for the FONT DESIGNER to choose the default spacing between sentences. That's as it should be. The rest of us should pass dot space to the font. The font designer "owns" legibility.
I, for one, have had a heck of a time unlearning the dot space space sequence I learned in high-school typing class.
WYSIWYG or compiled final output: the layout engine knows how to adjust keming better than i do, and will strip out or adjust space distances to look “right” no matter how many spaces I type. So i might as well type two and maintain hand memory consistency.
So as far as i’m concerned, it’s a no-op in practice. For myself i learned two-space long ago, my hands are unlikely to retrain themselves to type otherwise, and it’s probably a slight legibility help in docstrings and latex source.
edit: as i edit this on my phone i realize that one place this doesn’t work is on an on-screen keyboard. There, typing the second space too quickly usually inserts another period!
Double-space into period is a customizable feature of on-screen keyboards (at least Gboard).
For proportional fonts, on the other hand, two spaces would help the layout engine to distinguish between the end of a sentence and other uses of period-followed-by-space (abbreviations, mostly).
The abbreviation ends a sentence. It gets two spaces.
I still use two spaces at the end of a sentence in text messages. Pry them from my cold dead thumbs, etc.
As a side benefit, that extra space can help software identify a sentence vs a line which contains something like Mr. Bob. With a two-space system, Mr. Bob would be part of one sentence. In a one-space system, the software cannot tell if the sentence ends at Mr. with the next sentence beginning as "Bob ..."
It is harder to read, but other aspects contribute here too (overly wide or narrow columns, bad contrast, bad font choice, late-bound style/fonts/js/ads that move what you're reading, dancing hamsters)
If you prefer to keep one space instead of two you can use:
set nojoinspacesAnd that convention itself came about as an imitation of common 19th-century typesetting style, where more space after punctuation was still fairly normal. Technological and aesthetic changes--the adoption of Monotype and Linotype machines, and the influence of early book designers like Bruce Rogers--started a trend to more even spacing in typeset printed books.
https://crowdagger.github.io/textes/articles/heuristique.htm...
Although in Quebec they only do it before colons:
https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&let...
German used to put spaces before punctuation, now doesn't, and some guy on Usenet came up with a term for it:
The style is (largely) incorporated in https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius. An ello example with screenshots; https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/QGKKdiuqUw6O7ROl-V3uJA
Appears to be a higher chance of people reading them that way.
I don't write a lot of fluff though, and usually have two or three trimming passes before sending.
Now that you mention it though i bet there’s an easy macro to do this in emacs ...
I wonder if perhaps it was just a function of the teacher you had? The world was less connected (even now parts of education are individual preferences rather than rules). Oxford comma, punctuation inside or outside brackets, etc vs et cetra vs &ct
I guess it's down to teacher and style, as you say. I find it interesting that I never met this until post 2000 internet forums with Americans, though. I wonder how widespread it is.
And like tabs vs spaces, I get that there's a "this is the way" answer. Tabs are the right answer, and anyone who says spaces is an idiot. But 2 spaces after a full stop is clearly the right way, but I'm buggered if I can bring myself to do that ;)