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A Seminal Strike for the Older Convention! Two Spaces After a Period.
A small firefight has broken out in Ricochet. No, not the battle between the pious NeverTrumps like me and the um, other, people who are [deleted]. No, a much more important issue, namely the use of two spaces between each sentence, after the period, or the suggested new convention of only one space after a period. That issue has now been resolved by scientists. A seminal article in the Washington Post states
“The major reason to use two spaces, the researchers wrote, was to make the reading process smoother, not faster. Everyone tended to spend fewer milliseconds staring at periods when a little extra blank space followed it.
“The study’s authors concluded that two-spacers in the digital age actually have science on their side, and more research should be done to ‘investigate why reading is facilitated when periods are followed by two spaces.’”
So there Millennials and Microsoft Word! You are wrong! You may not correct my use of two spaces after a period. You do not get to set the new standards! Not this time. Not ever!
Two spaces after each period, please.
Published in General
I think the extra space makes the paragraph easier to read. Isn’t that worth the calories it takes to make that extra tap?
And without the Oxford comma the sentence can mean something else. Don’t you want it to mean what you meant it to mean? The Oxford comma is necessary. It shouldn’t even have a name.
I keep telling you that I’m a conservative.
There is something to be said for a judicious application of Ludditeism (or whatever it’s called). Nationalized Health Care is also “Getting With The Times”. :-)
Tell him, She. :-)
It pleases me not at all to write such things. Because my follow-up would have to be that I am old enough to remember, and to have actually used, an IBM Executive typewriter. Each character was assigned a width in units, proportional to its actual width, so (I think) a “w” was five units wide, and an “i” was two units wide. The resulting output was beautiful, and looked almost typeset, but they were beasts to use when it came to breaking at the right margin, centering text, and typing in columns, because all the calculations as to character width and the placement of the type had to be done manually.
(For those with long memories, it was the proportional spacing on the copies of the infamous 1972 Bush National Guard memos that started the “authenticity” flap. Very few machines at the time were capable of producing the professional output shown in the copies of the memos, and even fewer of them had the curved apostrophes and superscripts used in the memos as regular features. Further examination demonstrated that one or another of the Microsoft Word Times Roman fonts (can’t remember which) was an exact copy of the font in the memos, and the idea that they were authentic was pretty much abandoned at that point.)
If I recall correctly, when the story broke in 2004, a small, fairly new, conservative blogsite called, what was it, oh, yes, Powerline, was key to documenting it all and keeping it in the news.
I’ll bet Stormy has one . . .
“So there Millennials and Microsoft
Word! You are wrong! About everything.” There, I fixed it for you.It’s certainly true that I know no one who likes Windows 10. I dread the day Microsoft stops supporting 7. There may be Linux in my future.
The AP Style Guide does not call for use of the Oxford comma. That alone convinces me to use it.
I know I’m a luddite. Obama lectured me endlessly that I was on the “wrong side of history.” I intend to remain there.
Exactly correct. (Mark that down. I agreed with you that I won’t agree with you.)
As a professional page compositor of 25 years, I can confirm that the rule is one space after a period.
One of the more annoying things I have to do when I receive a manuscript is to remove all the double-spacing. And you’d think it would be easy, but sometimes people put in two spaces. Sometimes a space followed by a non-breaking space. Sometimes a non-breaking space followed by a space. Sometimes, what the heck, they put in three spaces. Or five. Or twenty-five.
So doing a find/change takes awhile because you have to account for all the variants people use. It would all be easier if they just made one space.
Now let’s talk about people who use multiple tabs instead of properly setting their tabs. Grrrr!!!
It’s the Washington Post. They still call Jen Rubin’s column “Right Turn.” Talk about anachronistic!
Ugh. I have a coworker who uses right-justification frequently. He also sometimes uses three spaces after a period. I don’t think we’ll ever be friends.
Are you referring to Mitt Romney here? Or was there an actual Executive model? The IBM Selectric was my baby when I was an Executive Secretary (take a letter, Maria) in the summers between my college years. That Selectric ball with the built in white out was outta sight!
I righteously declare myself, here, now and forever as:
#NeverTwoSpaces
For those of you whining about the removal of spaces, rich-text editors have to game HTML to show two spaces, since the W3C specification on rendering HTML removes extra, i.e., UNNECESSARY, spaces from content.
I’m sure people miss having an iceman coming around as well.
#TwoSpacesMustDie
Preach it, @drewinwisconsin.
lol. Yes, the typewriter model. The Selectric was a Johnny-Come-Lately (is that sexist or what?) in the typewriter field. I remember the one with the built in whiteout. We thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, until actual word processors with memory storage came along.
Cut my teeth in the office automation field. Executive and Selectric typewriters. Qyx and Qwip (Exxon’s offerings, typewriter and fax machine). Mag Card. Mag Tape. Vydec. CPT (which stood for Cassette-Powered Typewriter), Lanier, Wang, NBI. OCR machines. First laser printer I ever hooked to a word processing machine was as large as a washing machine, and about as temperamental. Early office networking, IBM PROFS and DISOSS. Good Lord. Need to take a cold shower.
I don’t give a flying fig about how many space you put after a period. Use tabs if you want to, for all I care.
Due to the Wang?
Well, I’m in a cold sweat over something. Could be . . .
Joking aside, here’s why you don’t do two spaces in the digital age. Whereas typewriters have a fixed width of 8 1/2 inches, and newspapers have columns with fixed widths, here on Ricochet the widths are fluid. You can resize your browser window to whatever you want. Now, we do have a minimum width and a maximum width, but in between are a lot of options, over which I have no control (and the author of a post has no control).
That was totally a haiku.
When you have a fixed width you can deal with the situation where a line ends with a period. You wouldn’t start the next line with a space. But what invariably happens with fluid widths on the web is that lines start with a space, and then look stupid.
Inserting two lines serves no purpose in modern word processing. My definition of conservatism does not include continuing to do things that are completely useless. To me, conservatism is about protecting old things that work, like traditional families, well also embracing new things that work, like computer technology that has existed for 40 years. (This new-fangled technology is getting dangerously close to be an “old thing that works.”)
And when you think of it, even on a typewriter “two spaces” wasn’t actually two spaces, because what you were doing was making up for the narrow width of the period. So half of the first “space” was really taken up with making the difference for the period compared to other characters. typing “two spaces” really gave you more like one and a half spaces. Whereas, with modern word processors two spaces really are two spaces. So if you’re doing “two spaces” because you’re a conservative you’re doing it wrong because you’re doing something different that what you were taught in fourth grade.
I took typing in the 11th grade. Two spaces.
On a typewriter?
Two spaces makes a more definitive break to signify the end of a sentence. As for the Oxford Comma, there is this example of a dedication one author put in her book:
I would like to thank my parents, Emily Dickinson, and God.
The editor was not a fan of the Oxford Comma, so he changed the dedication. To the author’s horror, it now read:
I would like to thank my parents, Emily Dickinson and God.
Of course. Manual.
I’d like to be able to claim that parentage.
Well, I break your silly rule and spit on it! Ptui! Ptui!
Just curious: when you are typing a comment here and you misspell a word by accident (happens to us all), do you put white-out on your screen, or do you use the delete key to correct your mistake.
White out. You should see my screen.