What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces.
What the articles fails to clearly mention, is that many style manuals used in high schools in the 80's were steeped in the monospaced technology of the time and taught two spaces as correct.
Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach.
This is one of the few mentions in this article of this fact -- that two-spacing was once dogma. This makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of this article. (Actually, I don't think this article is attempting any degree of objectivity at all.)
HN confuses this issue, since we type our comments monospaced, but they are displayed proportional. (Which is why I also double-dash!)
The author also fails to grasp the fact that if "Everyone-everyone!" (including "accomplished professionals") follows a given convention, then that convention must be correct, because that is what convention is.
Prescriptivists are universally incorrect, when they criticise universally practised convention.
In the case of the computer programmers, they were most certainly correct. Is the author really so quick to condemn while not realizing that programming is almost always done with monospaced fonts?
Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
Indeed, this really only seems to be an issue for the (admittedly large majority) of computer users who:
- write documents in a WYSIWYG editor
- don't publish those documents on the Web, or another setting where the reader's software (as opposed to the editor) makes decisions about how to display the text
Basically, this sounds like one more reason not to use Word (and similar), or share documents in .doc/.odt/etc. format [1]. It shouldn't even affect HTML email.
Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
You still need to pay attention to this using LaTeX -- LaTeX will (usually) insert a wider-than-normal space after a period, which isn't always correct (e.g., "Mrs.", "etc.", and so forth). You can avoid this using "~".
Actually, you should use a period inside parentheses if the enclosed material is meant to stand alone as a sentence.
By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English.
As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a period at the end of a sentence.
Exactly, when I'm at a computer I sometimes find myself back in my old habit of double spacing, and that's because of the double space tap on the iPhone. Perhaps I should disable the double tap space and get back in the habit of sliding my finger from [123] to the period key to end sentences (which automatically returns to the alphabet keyboard). Certainly it would save me from having to press delete after the double space to end a paragraph.
It's not tough to write 2000 words or so on the subject. It's just difficult to write 2000 words or so on the subject and still end up with so little substance.
> I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces.
>Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Seriously? That article felt like it was written by someone at 4chan. Why did this get so many upvotes?
Articles with the word "ever" in the title: Beware their gross generalizations, lack of gray area, and hasty conclusions.
Articles with both the words "never" and "ever" in the title: Never, ever read them. (oops)