One space after a period
Back in the day when “back in the day” wasn’t a grossly overused phrase, English teachers taught their students that every sentence ends with some form of punctuation: a question mark, an exclamation point, a period. And that punctuation necessarily is followed by two (count ’em, two) spaces before the next sentence officially begins.
That’s how I learned it.
That period-double-space thing was for school term papers, tests and such. And it was for the birds. Why in the world would we knowingly force our thumb to do the unnatural act of pressing down on the space bar twice at one shot? We were told that it helped the reader by providing more of a visual stop. Really? That black spot at the end of a decently written sentence isn’t enough of a clarification that the sentence is done, so a little extra white space should do the trick? Hmmm. Suspect.
In today’s fast-paced, cram-it-all-in society, that white space has been nudged out. And I, for one, am happy about that.
Although I do see a lot of period-double-space configurations in my editing work, the publishing tool that I currently work with mysteriously (and thankfully) eliminates one of those spaces — I don’t care which one, just that one is, indeed, obliterated, thank you very much.
Just remember that the English language morphs as it goes along, so it’s now OK to throw caution to the wind and only include one space after the ending punctuation. And if you happen to run into your middle school teacher, smile sweetly and say that you have fond memories of those days.
Happy trails!
SAK
I fear I must disagree with you on the notion that two spaces after the final punctuation in a sentence is one space too many, even though so doing opens me up to vast, heaping piles of scorn and derision (not from you, of course; from your many followers). Granted, the HTML standard suppresses multiple spaces, condensing them into one space, no matter how many of them are used. And people, being people, are lazy; they’ll try to omit an extra space here and there whenever they can. Doesn’t make it right.
For example, had I followed your suggestion in the paragraph above (I did not, regardless of how one’s browser displays it), I would have saved myself three keystrokes. Three. Not a huge savings, especially at the expense of clarity.
So, then, why does it still make sense to use two spaces at the end of a sentence? In the world of keyboards versus typewriters, there’s absolutely no reason why one should feel it is “harder” to type two spaces. (I’d even venture a guess that many people frequently generate multiple spaces by accident, based upon their repeated keypress settings, but I digress.) However, it is the world of text messaging, e-mailing, and (I shudder to say) “tweeting” wherein the two-space idiom makes the most sense. Many abbreviations occur in these methods of communication (incorrect and inappropriate variations, to be certain, but, again, I digress), and it will become increasingly more difficult to determine where one sentence ends and the next begins. As capital letters fall by the wayside, as abbreviations such as “r” for “are” (or is that “our”… or “hour”?) and “4″ for “for” (as well as “fore” and, astonishingly, “four”) quickly supplant their clear-intentioned original forms, as writing in general becomes less clear and increasingly ambiguous, two spaces between sentences may be the last, best hope for attempting to decypher messages.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Where have I been? I just found out about the 1 space thing about 6 months ago. It turns out that I need to remind myself (more like force) not to type the extra space. Old habits die hard. Gee this is making me feel really old… Hope I’m not using too many — I give up. One bad habit at a time…. Today the extra space, tomorrow the…
You make me laugh! It took me a long (and I mean really long) time to break the two-space habit. But now that I’m free of it, seeing two spaces makes me cringe. Sort of like an ex-smoker around those who still puff.
Hey, that’s a great way to look at it. I’d agree that the visual break might be helpful for texting and all the abbreviated snippits that get passed back and forth. I do have a “however,” however (would you expect anything else?!): Tweeting is its own beast. At 140 characters max, every space counts. I’ve had to carefully craft a few tweets in order to say exactly what I wanted to say with 140 characters and, in order to make it all fit, have abbreviated the fool out of words and even (gasp) left off a period. I think I might’ve even left out a space altogether after the period, just so I wouldn’t have to abbreviate a word so much that it would be impossible to decipher. So for texting, I’d say the 1-space rule stands.
And you’re also right that it’s not über-difficult to type two spaces. But the AP Stylebook (a journalist/writer’s bible) says to use one space, and I see no reason to use two in regular typed pieces (e.g., books, articles, papers), so I’m sticking with my original one-space recommendation. Total kudos to you for a great argument!
Hi SAK,I tweeted this post. Are you on twitter?
Cool beans! Thanks for letting me know. Yes, I’m on Twitter: skrehbiel1.