A New Scientific Study Supports Putting Two Spaces After a Period … and a Punctuation War Ensues

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In for­mer ages, wars erupt­ed over the fin­er points of reli­gious doc­trine, a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non that can seem per­plex­ing to mod­ern sec­u­lar­ists. We’re past such things, we think. But then let some­one bring up the Oxford com­ma or the num­ber of spaces one should put after a peri­od, and you may see writ­ers, edi­tors, and teach­ers pick sides and maybe come to blows in their defense of seem­ing­ly triv­ial gram­mat­i­cal and typo­graph­i­cal stan­dards. These debates approach the vehe­mence of Medieval argu­ments over tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion.

I exag­ger­ate, but maybe only slight­ly. There have been times, I con­fess, when I’ve felt I would fight for the ser­i­al com­ma. I grind my teeth and feel a rush of rage when I see two spaces instead of one after the end of sen­tences. Irra­tional, per­haps, but such is the human devo­tion to ortho­doxy in the details. And so, when Skid­more Col­lege researchers Rebec­ca John­son, Becky Bui, and Lind­say Schmitt pub­lished a paper last month in Atten­tion, Per­cep­tion, & Psy­chophysics claim­ing sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for a two-space peri­od, they vir­tu­al­ly lobbed a bomb into offices every­where.

Angela Chen at The Verge par­ried with an arti­cle call­ing two spaces a “hor­ri­ble habit.” The prac­tice “remains bad,” she writes, “it’s ugly, it doesn’t help when it comes to what mat­ters most (read­ing com­pre­hen­sion), and the exper­i­ment that sup­ports its ben­e­fits uses an out­dat­ed font style.” (Don’t get me start­ed on the font wars.) What was the exper­i­ment? The paper itself hides behind a redoubtable pay­wall, but Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Sean Gal­lagher gets to the gist of the study on a cohort of 60 Skid­more stu­dents.

Hav­ing iden­ti­fied sub­jects’ pro­cliv­i­ties, the researchers then gave them 21 para­graphs to read (includ­ing one prac­tice para­graph) on a com­put­er screen and tracked their eye move­ment as they read using an Eye­link 1000 video-based eye track­ing sys­tem. “Chin and fore­head rests were used to min­i­mize the read­er’s head move­ments,” the Skid­more researchers wrote in their paper.

After the track­ing, the researchers “eval­u­at­ed the read­ing speed for each of the para­graph types pre­sent­ed in words per minute.… [they] found that two spaces at the end of a peri­od slight­ly improved the pro­cess­ing of text dur­ing read­ing.” The study’s attempt to quan­ti­fy the ben­e­fits of two spaces came after the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Man­u­al’s most recent edi­tion, which, for some rea­son, has changed camps to two spaces.

Gal­lagher explains the space debate as stem­ming from the major tech­no­log­i­cal shift in word pro­cess­ing: “For any­one who learned their key­board­ing skills on a type­writer rather than a com­put­er… the dou­ble-space after the peri­od is a deeply ingrained truth.” Speak­ing as such a per­son, it isn’t, but he’s right to note that typ­ing teach­ers insist­ed on two spaces. Such was the stan­dard until com­put­ers with vari­able-width fonts ful­ly phased out type­writ­ers.

So the Skid­more researchers raised the ire of Chen and oth­ers with their use of Couri­er New, a “fixed-width font that resem­bles type­writ­ten text—used by hard­ly any­one for doc­u­ments.” The blog Prac­ti­cal Typog­ra­phy ana­lyzed the two space paper and remains unim­pressed: “In sum—a small dif­fer­ence, lim­it­ed to a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry of test sub­jects, with numer­ous caveats attached. Not much to see here, I’m afraid.” (This descrip­tion might accu­rate­ly describe thou­sands of pub­lished stud­ies.)

This war will rage on—the study fuel­ing these recent skir­mish­es does not seem to jus­ti­fy two-spac­ers claim­ing vic­to­ry. And any­way, good luck get­ting the rest of us to aban­don faith in the one true space.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­tor­i­cal Plaque Memo­ri­al­izes the Time Jack Ker­ouac & William S. Bur­roughs Came to Blows Over the Oxford Com­ma (Or Not)

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness