Please don’t use this study to justify your horrible habit of using two spaces after periods

Is it better to have one or two spaces after a period? The first study investigating this hotly contested issue is here, and it supposedly gives the win to the two-spacers. But a closer look at the research suggests that the only reasonable interpretation is that double spacing after a period remains bad. 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help when it comes to what matters most (reading comprehension), and the experiment that supports its benefits uses an outdated font style.

The “two-space” convention is left over from the days of typewriters. Typewriters allot the same amount of space for every character, so a narrow character like “i” gets as much as a wider character like “w.” (This is called a “monospaced font.”) With a typewriter, it makes...

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