I plead guilty to putting two spaces after a period. I learned it when I was in high school (not that I took typing in high school, but that’s when I taught myself from a book on a Selectric) and have been dong it for forty years. Of course, WordPress ignores them, so my blog posts come out single space anyway. But it makes a difference in Open Office or Word.
45 thoughts on “Old Dogs, New Tricks”
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That guy is a pompous moronic a-hole….he should be greatful that publishers are willing to pay him to remove double spaces.
BTW, Word, and most word processing programs, will do it automatically: It’s not like it would take more than a few minutes if someone actually had skills.
I didn’t take typing in high school either — by that time I could type the way I do, self-taught and in no way resembling the formal method, many times faster (and more accurately) than my classmates who did take typing. That may be why I never heard of a convention to doublespace at the end of a sentence.
Nor did anyone ever raise the issue with me later when I was typing up pieces for my college newspaper or to submit to commercial newspapers. Obviously my content was so captivating they didn’t even notice the stylistic sins.
I understand that our new-fangled typewriters are also equipped with a key for exclamation points and the number one. No longer shall we be reduced to typing a diminutive l for the former and a period, shifting the carriage back one space and then an apostrophe for the latter.
In my previous letter, I of course transposed the meaning of latter and former, but I am most certain that you have discovered my intention. Our typewriters might someday possess abilities as yet undreamed of which should allow one to properly edit and correct our missives before sending in the post.
I learned how to type back in 1978 (self-taught) on a Model 28 teletype, a mechanical horror that used 5 bit Baudot code. It had three rows of keys. Numbers were on the top row, but to type them, you had to hit the Num key. When you were done with numbers, you had to hit the Ltr key. Failure to do so would result in a garbled mess. Of course, there was no word-wrap so we had to type in two carriage returns and a line feed at the end of each line.
We typed blind with the output coming out on paper tape. We’d then print it to proof-read our work. Editing was cumbersome. If you realized you made a mistake while typing, you could backspace and hit the Ltr key to strike out the error. If you caught the mistake during proof-reading, you’d use the paper tape to generate a new tape and attempt to stop in time to fix the error. It was a pain. The Model 28 was all mechanical and difficult to keep properly adjusted. Some keys would stick, meaning you had to strike them very hard.
We put two spaces after each ending punctuation mark. When I moved on to word processors with proportional fonts, I gladly gave up that habit. There is no need for double-spacing if you use proportional fonts (most of them).
Heh. I guess I still do a double space at the end of the sentence as well. I didn’t know that was now considered old-school. Of course, I was probably was one of the last batch of students who learned typing on a typewriter.
~Jon
Ok, now I actually bothered reading the article, and…wow. Makes you wonder how often the writer gets dates… Also makes me wonder if things I feel passionate about seem that trivial to everyone else. Instead of a long-winded diatribe, he could’ve just pointed out that the “two space” rule was actually just a fluke from typewriters, and that a single space is what’s considered proper. That would be a nice, useful, and informative article. Instead I find myself intentionally wanting to keep using double spaces just to piss people like him off.
~Jon
I find myself intentionally wanting to keep using double spaces just to piss people like him off.
You and me both. It would actually take effort for me to unlearn a forty-year habit, and I’m less inclined to do it now.
I like two spaces after a period. I think it looks better. Courier also happens to be my favorite font, because it looks like a typewriter. Obviously, this guy is a one size fits all, universalist of the Obama variety.
I’m a two-spacer.
Here you go, the code to add an extra space after your periods.
You know, if you want to send an email to that guy.
One space, or two? It’s really hard for me to care. This is just another idiot Internet meme. Personally I use two spaces.
APA requires two spaces. MLA (used mostly in English and the humanities) went to one space some years ago when they also deleted the cover page requirement to save paper and trees…
I thought it was an interesting article even though it contained flaws. He says…
on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read.
Since he points out that some typewriters can do proportional spacing and some fonts are monospaced it would have been more correct to say ‘with monospaced type’ rather than ‘on a typewriter.’
I have been retraining myself to use a single space after a sentence for one reason only. If your sentence breaks at the end of the line, that second space may cause your next sentence to indent on the next line.
I could go postal over this.
Paper tape with its five bit code was my first offline storage medium. Not quite as convenient as the cassette tape which came many years later. Carrying around a rolled up yard diameter circle of paper a half inch thick was an experience. Especially when surrounded by highschool teenagers that had no clue.
My first job in NY still had punchcard stations, but I did most of my editing as a job on the mainframe until the second shift operator would not see me working and shut me down (lost a whole days work once that way.)
Typesetters have decided that the decades-long-taught method of two spaces after periods is now incorrect. In other news, buggy whip manufacturers say you’re holding your steering wheel wrong.
When I was a kid, we used to dream of typewriters with fixed spacing. We had to carve each letter into clay tablets with a sharpened stick.
We had to carve each letter into clay tablets with a sharpened stick.
You had a stick? Slacker.
I would have more sympathy with the guy if he had politely pointed out, to those of us who learned to type on a typewriter back in the dark ages, that two spaces were no longer desirable. After all, people are only doing what they have been taught. Chill!
Personally, I switched spontaneously from two spaces to one somewhere between Windows 3.0 and Windows 95, when I started using write.exe to type all of my correspondence and printed it on a dot matrix printer. A single space just seemed to look better with a proportional font.
I’m only 29, but I double-space when using Final Draft for my work, because FD uses a non-proportional Courier font. On all other work, I single-space after periods.
You had a stick? Slacker.
We dreamed of sticks. We had to make do with growing out fingernails and sharpening them against flat rocks.
Fingernails? The young people are always looking for shortcuts. I am proud to say in my day we never took the easy way out — we carved our letters into granite slabs by licking them! The first page will be done any century now.
I never formally learned typing, yet somehow managed to land a job at a small printing company as a typesetter in 1990. (I still call myself a typesetter, even though it’s of course done with computers and proportional fonts nowadays.)
To help me get up to speed, my new boss loaned me a book on typing. I worked my way through enough of it to get by, but never got around to finishing it. I don’t remember whether it advised to use one or two spaces.
On one of the first big typesetting jobs I had, I used one space and the customer was upset about it. I’ve been using two ever since.
Underwood 5 in high school and I still use two spaces. Hey, it’s where the girls were.
I took typing in 1985 and I was taught 2 spaces 🙂 I still use them about half the time (my android automatically inserts a period anytime I double-space)
I’m a two spacer, and in other news, I’m sticking with being a Sagittarius. Call me old fashion. Maybe even conservative.
My dead stepdad used to call that sign SaggyBaggyAss. I don’t know why.
That’s very interesting, ken. Did he say it himself or through a medium?
Oh, you were lucky to have granite slabs…
Funny. C’mon people! It’s easy to only put one space after a period. I learned the old two-space rule on a typewriter as well but hey, that’s ancient history.
Oddly enough, while helping someone online with their English lesson another commenter told the young lady to ALWAYS use two spaces after a period. As it turned out, the commenter was a young lady whose teacher had beat it into her head to use two spaces. I had to deprogram this poor girl of that notion.
Let’s discuss something serious … Does the period (or question mark) go inside or outside the “quote”? In this case, I’d say outside but you’ll get arguments both ways …
Typesetters work for people who are concerned with creating a product cheaper. A book, magazine or newspaper. It may not seem like a saving on one page, but over a year it would add up.
But removing spaces from E-MAIL, is just plain stupid.
I know those on the left are all about conserving and saving the planet. And most journalists are lefties, so I presume this writer is from that side, so he may be looking at this from a save the earth view.
But unless we’re running out of pixel pulp trees, or unless America’s mines are running out of dualspacium (that being the ore from which we refine pixels) then what difference does it make in ELECTRONIC MEDIA!!!! It’s just pixels, on a screen.
I’m starting a group to save our God given, All-American right to put spaces in where we did so traditionally.
Give me two spaces, or give me death!!!
I’m not sure how he removes the extra space either. Most writing software just ignores the extra space unless you go to the trouble of putting in a code, like the one I linked to above.
What drives me crazy is people who don’t know where to put even the single needed space. The put the space in front of the punctuation mark, not after, so you get something like this: it drive me ,crazy to see people write wrong .Why do they dothat ?
Typesetters are now the guardians of the grammar of the English language? When did that happen? I thought that, perhaps, the writing/literature-related boards were the closest thing we had to a Supreme Court on matters of grammar, not mere typesetters (/snark).
I use two spaces. Sure, a lot of board scripts and other programs will cut the second one out. I let them; when in Rome, etc. Not a lot of people will notice, either way; unfortunately, in related news, far too people will object to the usage of shortcuts such as “u” these days. If there is not an artificial character limit imposed by the medium of transmission, there is no real benefit to dropping the “o” and the “y”.
Oh, and that’s another thing; while I was taught to always put the punctuation inside the final quote, that never made any sense to me, so I began making on-the-spot decisions each time. Turns out, that’s actually the standard in other parts (Britain?). I prefer the additional flexibility, which, utilized properly, increased the clarity of a sentence containing a quote. Of course, someone will surely ask, “What do you do when the closing punctuation of the quote disagrees with that of the larger sentence?”.
Notice it’s only the period the really misbehaves this way — although the comma has some deviationist tendencies that must be watched by Miniluv operatives — and this is why I simply avoid their use; eschew enslavement by the bourgeois period, comrades: look with favor on the loyal and honest semicolon, colon, and em dash.
aaand, I see I over-edited a word out of existence (again).
Since there is no Academie Francaise for American English, the task of standardization historically has fallen to publishers. So long as each publisher is consistent (and especially if they each follow similar conventions), few are the wiser.
I took typing in High School and learned on an IBM Wheelwriter. I was taught to use two spaces after a period. I was literally the last class that learned on the typewriter as the very next year they replaced them with the Apple Macintosh. But even then they continued to teach to use double spaces. We even learned to put two spaces after a colon. Though now when I do that in MS Word it freaks out with a typo underline like, “What the hell you typing it like that for?”
A little known fact, Josh, is that the copies of MS Word sold to journalists have enhanced commercial-grade grammarcheck features, so that when they attempt to write a sentence like Yesterday a Democratic Senator was caught sodomizing a goat the word “Democratic” gets a wavy underline and Clippy pops up to ask “Did you mean ‘Republican?’
An earlier commenter noted the MLA ( Modern Language Association) changed over to one space after a period “to save trees”.
Having read some of the – stuff- put out by the MLA in the name – I guess the word I am looking for is “research” and having attended a recent MLA convention with my wife- who was a member at that time- I hereby nominate the MLA notion of delete a space- save a tree as the most inane thing ever posted on this web site and quite possibly on the entire web. This sentence added only so I could place THREE spaces between sentences out of spite.
+5 funny, CP.
Oh wait, you weren’t joking… D:
Did he say it himself or through a medium?
Do you remember in the movie Serenity where the doctor asks his sister River if he was talking to Miranda now?
I’m giving you that look.
He said it on many occasions while alive. Apparently it was the pinnacle of humor. Another thing he would say while stopped at a red light with the family in the car and with the window rolled down loud enough to be heard by the object of his comment… “She’s so fat, if she fell down she’d roll right out of town.”
He was always making remarks like that in public and never caring who heard him. Frankly, he had a comment like that for all occasions and I don’t remember most of them.
I’ll keep my two spaces, thank you. It bugged the lawyer that I used to date, because she used only one.
I’ve also been told that I over-use commas, and that I should stop using the last comma before “and” in my three-or-more item series’. I’ll continue doing that, too, thankyouverymuch.
My favorite part of the article was how the author upheld the social emergence of 1-space among proportional font typesetters as legitimate and good, because everyone was doing it, and then in the next breath pooh-poohed the social emergence of 2-spaces, even though everyone was doing it.
1 space. Lazy. Saves typing.
As a scientist, I will chose clarity over form every time. That means I double space after a period. After all, you need to be able to distinguish between a period (full stop as the British are wont to say) that ends a sentence and that which ends an abbreviation.
As for punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks, the Brits agains have that one right. Inside the quotes if it is part of the quote, otherwise outside.
Next thing you know this idiot at Salon will be railing against the Oxford comma. Besides he really does not understand how modern typesetting software works,yes it is true that it only places one space after a period, but generally it places an em-dash length space, not an en-dash length space, so the space between sentences actually is larger than that between words within a sentence, though not twice as long. Proportionally it is more like a space and a half.