Comments on: The space(s) between

By: Let’s Talk Grammar | Build A Better Blog

Let’s Talk Grammar | Build A Better Blog — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:16:57 +0000

[...] The Space(s) Between byMighty Red Pen [...]

By: Ray Gunn

Ray Gunn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:59:04 +0000

Apologies: my understanding is that

By: Ray Gunn

Ray Gunn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:57:18 +0000

In American book publishing the standard is one space after punctuation. Always. We reject manuscripts that are sent to us with two spaces. Or at least make the editorial assistants clean up the file so that they all go away. My understanding that the two-space practice originated before there were fixed-spaced fonts and it was a workaround so that there weren’t ugly crashes between punctuation and the letter that followed.

By: Amanda Cullen

Amanda Cullen — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:26:54 +0000

Two spaces can actually be a hindrance when you are sending out HTML emails or are dealing with a database of written content. I often edit newsletters and blogs and have experienced problems with email inboxes and databases interpreting the extra space character ( ) in unfortunate ways. So, to all of you writers out there, save your web editors some hassle and use just one space.

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:17:19 +0000

I learned to type with two spaces (I’m not that old, but my typing class in junior high still had typewriters). Even at the time I knew that it was an outdated convention that I would not be using in the real world, and I thought it was silly that they were still teaching us that practice. Once I got out of that class and started typing on a computer, it took me all of a week or two to break the habit and go back to using one space. I’ve always found it a little surprising that so many people are so attached to their two spaces and have a hard time letting go of them.

By: Jess

Jess — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:12:55 +0000

I’m still relatively young (22) and all through school, I was taught the two space rule.
It wasn’t until I got into newspapers that I had to break the habit and go one space. Now, seeing two spaces vexes me.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:28:37 +0000

I learned to type on a manual typewriter and indeed picked up the habit of using two spaces after a period (or other sentence-ending punctuation, but never colons) there. Now that I’ve completely transitioned to a computer, I still use two spaces. This is mostly out of habit, but there are some technical issues at play here.

First, when I’m reading monospaced text on a computer screen (like email — I *abhor* HTML email and happily use a text-only email client) I find the double-space between sentences easier to read. Perhaps this is only because I’m used to it, though.

Second: when I’m writing significant chunks of prose, like an academic paper or my recently-completed dissertation, I use LaTeX. It and other TeX variants ignore the precise amount of whitespace entered by the author (much like HTML, as a commenter pointed out above). However, TeX and its descendants use a heuristic to detect the ends of sentences and various other places and *automatically* insert a little extra space (though not as much as a full inter-word space) between the period or other closing punctuation and the start of the following sentence. This is independent of whether the author uses one space or two.

Third: I use the Emacs text editor for all but the simplest writing tasks. In addition to the normal cursor movement commands (forward-character, forward-word, forward-line), it also has forward-sentence and backward-sentence commands, and it relies on the additional space to distinguish sentence-ending periods from periods in abbreviations in the middle of a sentence.

By: windycityguide

windycityguide — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:17:01 +0000

I use one space and it always drives me crazy when people use two, because it just looks glaring to me. I do recall using two spaces on my word processor back in the day, but it started to just look bad to me in the computer age. Maybe I’ll show this to my husband and see if I can’t break him of the habit.

By: tk.

tk. — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:52:40 +0000

I never took typing lessons, but I habitually use the double space. I’ve been trying hard to break myself of the habit. (Even as I wrote that last sentence I ended it with a double space.) Notably, HTML never renders more than one space unless you explicitly use the non-breaking space entity, so that helps if you’re writing to the web.

By: sefcug

sefcug — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:51:55 +0000

Personally, I have gotten away from the two spaces, even though I am old enough to have been using them a long time, because I was trained before the days of the computer.
I think this is mostly because I now edit two user group newsletters, and am constantly editing submissions, especially from those who learned in the typewriter age. I do this with a find and replace function in either MS Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, and also use the same function to remove the double paragraph marks, another holdover from the typewriter days.
I understand these are hard habits to break, but they are not that much of an issue to me as an editor, due to the ease of correcting.