One Space or Two Spaces after Full Stop? Scientists Have The Correct Answer!

As if there was a shortage of contentious topics for Grammar Nazis to spar about, scientists have thrown open a brand new debate.  Since time immemorial, boundary lines were drawn, relationships have been soured, and friends have turned foes over topics such as the Oxford comma, who-whom debate and split infinitives.  A new grammatical rule, backed by some science, now once again threatens to upset whatever semblance of peace we have managed to achieve in the erratic world of English grammar.  Yesterday, Congress MP and Twitter’s favourite human thesaurus Shashi Tharoor shared an article about a study on the spacing between a full stop and the following sentence.  Tharoor, the nation’s anointed word guru, doesn’t agree with the rule but he says it doesn’t matter.

Although the norm is to leave a single space after the full stop, the researchers Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui and Lindsay L. Schmitt have reasons to believe that two spaces after the period is ideal.  According to the study published in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, the most recent edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) Manual holds that two spaces should follow the full stop instead of one.  It also mentions that there exists no empirical data to support either usage.  In the study, the participants performed two tasks: a typing task to asses spacing usage and an eye-tracking experiment to assess the effect of the spacing.

Why bother to put so much time and effort into this non-issue right? But studies on the same topic have been conducted in the past too, which threw up all kinds of conclusions.  A 2005 study showed that a two-space gap after the full stop helped reduce lateral interference of the eyes and helped simplify reading.  Ten years later, another study refuted the findings of the 2005 study.  And in 1998, an experiment had concluded that neither conventions made any difference to reading!

The researchers dictated a short paragraph to the student participants and found out that only 21 among the 60 used two spaces.  Rest used a single space.  They used an eye tracker Eyelink 1000 to track their eye movement as they read 20 paras that contained lines with two spaces and one space after the full stop.  The findings suggested that the participants were more comfortable reading lines that had double spacing after the full stop since their eyes lingered there for shorter durations.  The study states: “Although comprehension was not affected by punctuation spacing, the eye movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces, supporting the change made to the APA Manual.”

Back in the days, a time before personal computers and Microsoft Word, the world preferred two spaces after the full stop since typewritten letters of the alphabet were of equal width.  And without the extra space after the full stop, the whole write up can look cramped and unsightly.  The double-space rule was made precisely with this problem in mind. A casual internet search reveals that most people oppose the double spacing.  Some writers have very strong opinions about it.

It's not like we have to take sides immediately.  For now, we can follow whichever rule that suits us best.  Like most controversial rules in grammar, you can either take it or leave it.  Nevertheless, those who follow the APA style may have to comply with the rule.  And in case you didn’t notice, the entire article has been written with two spaces after the period.  Not too bad, huh?

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 08, 2018 02:07 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).