![]() ![]() Or, as a friend put it, it’s like using horses to test whether a dirt road or a paved road is more efficient for automobile traffic. That kind of methodology is the equivalent of using tumor-prone rats to test whether an exposure causes the rats to… grow tumors. In fact, perhaps the only thing we can all agree on is that two spaces is appropriate with fixed-width fonts like typewriter text. Single spaces only became standard when variable-width fonts became standard, so it makes no sense to use a fixed-width font to determine whether two spaces is appropriate. The whole point of using two spaces relied on using fixed-width fonts. Typography scholars know the reason double spaces became standard is that typewriters use only fixed-width (or monospaced) fonts, so having two spaces between sentences made it easier to distinguish the sentences in text where an “i” takes up the same amount of space as “w.”īut the advent of word processors and computers changed that because nearly all their fonts are variable-width-except a couple handful of fixed-width ones that imitate typewriter fonts, the best known of which is… the Courier family. What makes it bad is that their methods invalidate their findings: they used Courier New font to measure students’ reading speeds with eye trackers. It also does not account for generational differences given that some people grew up with double spaces and some have known nothing other than the single space (ie, the right way).īut those limitations don’t make it a bad study, just a limited one. Only about a third of people in the US have a 4-year degree-a statistic that does not include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, Walt Disney and other folks you’ve probably heard of-and this study cannot conclude anything about what influences their reading. And, as with many behavioral studies, findings from college students are not generalizable to the general population. First, 60 participants is way too small to draw any broad conclusions. ![]() The participants were 60 native-English-speaking college students with normal or corrected vision. ![]() Consider this a case study for the sorts of things to look for when you're assessing the validity of a new medical study's findings. ![]() Before I dig in, why am I blasting this typography study in a health column? The flaws in this study are the same kinds of flaws seen in thousands of medical studies. ![]()
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