One lump or two?
Q: How many spaces do you use after a full stop?
A: Whatever LaTeX thinks is appropriate. We have computers so that people don’t have to worry about that sort of thing.
Q: How many spaces do you actually type?
A: Two. I was brainwashed by the program that taught me touch-typing.
Q: Me too! Science has just proved us right!
A: <eyeroll emoji>
Q: It’s in the Herald! And in the Washington Post!: One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.
A: I see what they did there. <unimpressed emoji>
Q: But Science?
A: The researchers took a group of people who used two spaces after full stops and another group who used one, and got them to read text with different spacing conventions. They measured reading speed and comprehension
Q: And the one-space texts were read faster and comprehended better?
A: “In the analysis of reading speed, although there was not an overall significant effect of period spacing or typing condition, there was a significant effect of comma spacing such that readers read paragraphs faster when they were written with only one space after the commas, as is the common convention.”
Q: That’s… not really what the story says.
A: No. No, it isn’t. There was a slight tendency for people to read faster when the spacing in the text matched the spacing they personally tended to use.
Q: And what do they mean about “only one space after the comma”?
A: They looked at one or two spaces after the comma as well as after the full stop.
Q: <anguished face emoji>
A: Indeed.
Q: But at least it shows two spaces at the end of the sentence is ok?
A: Under the conditions of the experiment, yes, there’s weak support for that point of view.
Q: I’m sensing an implied asterisk here
A: The Herald story says, near the start “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.”
Q: Yes?
A: The experiment was done in the monospaced font Courier New.
Q: How is that relevant to, like, anything in the modern world? I mean, even if you want a monospaced font for coding or something you can use Monaco or Hack or Consolas
A: Well, you might think that if two spaces was bad in real-world use it would be even worse in Courier New, but it’s not how I would have done the experiment.
h/t David Hogg
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I used to use two but everyone just seems to be using one nowadays (in anything I edit in MS Word anyway) so I’ve recently just switched to one.
Maybe Word is putting the “right” length in even if only one space is typed? IMHO (humble not honest) it’s probably not, Word never does anything useful by default, and usually something not useful at all.
I guess if everyone uses full justification then it doesn’t matter too much anyway.
6 years ago
No, I don’t think Word does that sort of alignment. It’s more a publishing thing than a word-processing thing. Word also doesn’t go to the same lengths for justification that human or software publishing does — it doesn’t insert hyphens to break words, for example.
6 years ago