According to Slate: “Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.”
How Many Spaces After A Period?
How Did Christopher McCandless Die?
Working off of some investigative work done by Ronald Hamilton – a writer who recently worked as a bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania library – Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer may have finally determined the cause of Christopher McCandless’s death in the Alaskan wilderness.
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Runways for Days
"I took my son to Paris fashion week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants." Michael Chabon writes a beautiful piece for GQ about going couturing with his son, Abraham. Pair with yesterday's essay by R. J. Hernández on fashion in literary fiction.
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Another View
"But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion."
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What Soderbergh is Reading
Remember back in 2011 when Steven Soderbergh made that list (PDF) of every movie, TV show, book, play and short story he had watched that year? Well according to his recent interview with New York Magazine, the book he most recently finished is Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. (And what a coincidence! The book Murray most recently blurbed is Epic Fail, our first Millions Original.)
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Mary McCarthy’s Recycled Fiction
Perhaps best known for her fiction, specifically her classic The Group, Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by chance. "McCarthy was good at recycling – a term which she used herself – and good, also, as she admitted, at plagiarizing her own life. Nevertheless, her fiction lives, and some of it has been highly influential." Margaret Drabble takes us through McCarthy's major works of fiction, featured in Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction which was released this year in a deluxe collection for the very first time.
Some of us knew that sooner than others. Old habits die hard, especially ones for which the practitioners cannot give a good justification, likely since they’ve never considered their automatic and unconsidered adherence.
Well… not quite “totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably.” The “two spaces” rule was adopted with the advent of the typewriter. It helped, along with various punctuation marks, to set off the end of one sentence from the beginning of the next as a reader scanned the words. This was needed because typewriters for decades created what’s called “monospaced” printing. Each character occupied the same amount of space on the line. Most of the time, that was either 1/10 or 1/12 of an inch. This was unnatural for the reader. Hand writing is not monospaced, nor is type that is set for books and magazines, where the rule is one space between sentences.
Nowadays, though, many people’s printed words are in typefaces that use what’s called “proportional” spacing (this blog is one of them), so, in those cases, one space is correct. However, if you are certain that your words will be sent out to the world in monospaced type (and there are still a few places like that out there, even on the web), then using two spaces would not be inappropriate. After all, anything that makes it easier for the reader to read your words is a good thing.
I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Peter, that’s precisely right! Perfect.
I can’t believe how much coverage this silly Slate article has gotten. It’s the same sort of prideful ignorance, bolstered by selective citation, that it’s supposedly dethroning.