Much to my chagrin, I see that you have backtracked on that. I read theses and dissertations for a living and was pleased that APA, along with the Chicago Style Guide, recommended the use of only one space after a period. WHY did you return to the typewriter way of doing things? Two spaces after a period does NOT improve readability it creates rivers of white space that are most annoying. I love you, fellow middle-aged folks, but it’s time we all join the modern age and spend just a little less time leaning on the space bar.Īctually, a period and one space visually denote the end of the sentence. It wasn’t until 1999, when I got a copyediting job with the New England Journal of Medicine, that I learned the “new” rule. I know I did: I remember sitting in a computer lab in 1998, going through my students’ papers, marking all the places where they needed to add an extra space after the period. And until you unlearn it, you’ll probably force this funky old rule on your own students. We got our papers marked wrong if we didn’t. Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo went so far as to say that it is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.īut these articles are not reaching everyone, probably because for many of us who learned to type before computers, it was hammered into our heads over and over and OVER again to use two spaces. If you do even a little bit of research on this topic, you’ll find plenty of articles practically begging you to stop using two spaces. That’s why a proportional font can squeeze 12 letters into the same space where a monospace font can only fit nine: Word processors and computers and everything that is not a very old typewriter use mostly proportionally spaced fonts, which adjust spacing to the size of the letter. We needed that extra space between sentences to make it easier to see the beginning of new sentences.
This is called monospaced typesetting and it’s, well, spacey. That meant the letter i was given the same amount of space as the letter m, even though it clearly didn’t need it. Here’s why: Back when we used typewriters, every character was given the exact same amount of space on the page. Unless you are typing on an actual typewriter, you no longer have to put two spaces after a period. My semester of typing remains one of the most valuable classes I ever took in high school - I can still dazzle small children with my ability to make words appear on a screen by just hysterically wiggling my fingers on the keyboard.īut one rule from typing class has definitely expired, and if you’re over 40, it’s possible that no one has given you the message. We had those, but they had big, actually floppy disks and honest to God, no one had any idea what to do with them.
I learned to type in 1987 on an IBM Selectric typewriter. A typewriter, not a computer. (Before I start, I should mention that I am over 40.)
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