According to Slate: “Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.”
How Many Spaces After A Period?
The Story Behind the Letter
Letters of Note posted an incredible letter from a former slave, and Kottke rounded up some more info he and others uncovered about the letter writer.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Yuknavitch; Keyes; Rich; Pierpont; Hobbs; Johncock; Hall; Taseer; Waclawiak; Mitchell; Markovits; Bai; Keating; Lepucki
Out this week: The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch; The Woman Who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes; The Hand that Feeds You by A.J. Rich; Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont; Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs; The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock; Speak by Louisa Hall; The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer; The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak; Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell; You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits; French Concession by Xiao Bai; The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating; and the paperback edition of our own Edan Lepucki’s California. For more on these and other new titles, check out our latest book preview.
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Romance Incarnate
The best way to celebrate May Day? Read Tennyson‘s “The May Queen,” become “Romance Incarnate.”
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Coda
Sad that Mad Men is over? We’ve got just the thing. Back in 2012, our own Hannah Gersen compiled a list of ten books to read when a given season — or, in this case, the series — comes to an end.
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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.