“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”
In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.” [...]
Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.” [...]
Such an argument is extremely difficult to make when it comes to sentence spacing, because the evidence is not there for either case. The fact that the scientifically optimal number of spaces hasn’t been well studied was odd to Johnson, given the strength of people’s feelings on the subject. The new American Psychological Association style guidelines came out recently, and they had changed from one space to two spaces following periods because they claimed it “increased the readability of the text.” This galled Johnson: “Here we had a manual written to teach us how to write scientifically that was making claims that were not backed with empirical evidence!”
No comments:
Post a Comment