Thursday, December 8, 2011

Double Space After a Period? NOOOOOO!

He writes, "Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong."


Came across a blog this morning by Farhad Manjoo at Slate about the use of two spaces after a period: http://goo.gl/S6FqU


He goes on to explain the history of this practice and urges everyone to get a clue and stop using two spaces!

Farhad explains how many typographers react to double spaces:
Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."

So please, tell your students, your friends, your neighbors, your manicurist, for cryin' out loud: STOP USING TWO SPACES!

I thank you, and I'm sure Farhad would thank you too.

9 comments:

  1. Old Fogey touch typists (like me) have trouble changing, Andy. Maybe there is an app to delete them all before final draft?

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you're using Microsoft Word, there are settings in the Grammar Check that you can set to single or double spaces after periods. Just run Grammar Check and green dashes will underline problem areas, and from there you can probably find a fairly quick way to adjust the manuscript.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Even easier: Create a macro that does a search-and-replace, switching two spaces to one. Then give it a special keystroke combination. Easy-peasy! I'd give directions on making a macro but I don't know what version of Word you have.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I had my 70 page dissertation proposal completed and the APA Manual changed. I had to manually change my spacing after all sentences. Was not fun....

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's not a concept that's ancient. I am young. I graduated in 2003. I learned that two spaces after a period ending a sentence is proper. Sorry, America, but your laziness needs to stop trying to change the English language. I would assume that two spaces after sentences are there so readers can easily differentiate between a new sentence and a proper noun in a list. It's something I learned as a child, and I will not stop properly using the English language.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sorry, timramich, it's got nothing to do with grammar or the English language, it has to do with typesetting, and your teachers were as wrong then as they would be today if they're still teaching it that way. Two spaces was useful for precisely the reason you suggest, to provide more visual space between one sentence and the next. It was done that way, however, when we used typewriters. When computers came along and all we had were fixed-width fonts, two spaces remained helpful. Fixed-width fonts are those that give each letter the same horizontal space, so an i got as much space as an m, the widest letter.

    We don't really use fixed-width fonts anymore, so we don't need two spaces between sentences. In fact, nowadays for anyone who deals in publishing and the printed page, it looks odd to have two spaces.

    So please understand that using only one space isn't aimed at changing the English language, which will survive quite well on its own. Rather we're trying to change the way people place that wonderful language on the page and to make the reading experience smoother and more natural.

    ReplyDelete
  7. My apologies for this comment reading "Anonymous." Thought I had logged in.

    ReplyDelete