Do you put two spaces after each sentence? Feel free to comment below! I never have– but maybe I should? Read on to find out…
An article recently appeared in the Washington Post with the title “One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.” It was prompted by a recent study, and is promoted (with this click-baitish title) as resolving one of those age-old debates: should there be two spaces, or a single space, in between sentences?
The TL;DR version? The story goes that historically, for legibility purposes, two spaces were always printed in between sentences. Like I’m now doing in this paragraph (although spoiler alert: I don’t normally double space, and don’t think it’s important!). Then along came the computer, creating an explosion of fonts and styles of typography (a topic for another day, but see some of the further reading below!). It was argued that while old fonts, which were all monospaced due to the constraints of the typewriter and printing presses (meaning, each letter had the same width), may have benefited from the double spacing, the new fonts created by computers were not constrained in this way. And it’s certainly true that most of our commonly used fonts nowadays are not monospaced (the most common exception is probably Courier).
The new study touted in the Wasingtion Post article (Are two spaces better than one? The effect of spacing following periods and commas during reading) reports that, using eye-tracking methods, it was found that indeed double spacing is better (read more about eye tracking here)! The reporting on this study is a good example of misleading science communication, however– a bit closer look at what the authors actually found, and you’ll see that you shouldn’t start double-spacing if you haven’t been! For those of you who do, the good news is, you may as well keep on doing it.
The best reason to not change your typing habits, based on this study? Probably none of us should ever change our behavior because of the results of one study! This is a basic, but crucial point. If you’ve ever read more than one article on a new finding about what you should or shouldn’t eat or drink, you know this frustration– science works best as compiling results, from different studies, fields, methods, researchers, and labs. So, if all you care about is whether this study has unequivocal evidence to start or stop double-spacing, you can stop reading here: it definitely does not.
So what did they find? This was the first study to directly examine whether single or double spacing is better, and as I mentioned, they used eye-tracking methods, so you can really get a lot of detailed information about how well people were reading. Are you surprised no one studied this before? Well in fact, there are dozens of studies that have looked at spacing, and that used eye-tracking– but they all looked either a t t h e s p a c i n g between letters, or the spacing between words– not just the spacing between sentences.
What did those studies might find, you ask? An amazingly mixed set of results! And what is one of the take-home messages? Two things are really important for determining how spacing will affect you: (1) whether you’re familiar with the spacing (so, you may read worse just because it unusual for you to read that way)!, and (2) which fonts were used in the study.
And sure enough, this new study on double-spacing had results that relate to both of those matters. First, remember that claim that double-spacing was better for monospaced fonts? Well, this study did indeed use a monospaced font (Courier!) and did not test any others. And secondly, and perhaps most crucially, they found a difference between people who normally single-spaced and those who normally double-space. While there was no effect on anyone’s comprehension of the sentences or their overall reading times, people who normally type with double-spacing (which was 21/60 people in their sample), did read more words-per-minute (WPM) when they read sentences with double-spacing, compared to single spacing. For those who normally type with single-spacing, they actually read a little bit fewer WPM in double-spaced paragraphs!
The upshot for the researchers was that they found all participants, whether or not they’re used to double-spacing, basically spent less time looking at the areas of the sentences around the periods, if there were two spaces. But again: this didn’t lead to better comprehension, or even to less time spent reading overall. So while it does seem that, at least for this one study and this one font, everyone may benefit from double-spacing, the benefit is limited to a short-term one: your eyes flow more evenly past the period and onto the next sentence, but this benefit doesn’t add up to anything in the context of the entire paragraph.
So as you can tell, I’m sticking to my single spaces!
Further reading:
The History of Typography – Britannica online