May 06--Please stop putting two spaces between sentences.
It makes you look like a dinosaur.
Yes, I will get a lot of angry letters for that last remark. But you really should thank me. Or your secretary should thank me.
For those subjected to working with people who continue to hit that space bar twice, memorize these instructions for find and replace in Microsoft Word.
For Mac users, hit shift-Apple-H.
For PC users, hit CTRL H.
Hit the space bar twice in the first field. Hit it once in the "Replace With" field. Then click "replace all."
(Even though I know these shortcuts, for some reason I continue to go line by line fixing this mess.)
Now, I wasn't always wise to this. Thankfully, journalism school beat it into me at a very early age.
The Bible for journalistic style, "The Associated Press Stylebook," says: "Use a single space after the period at the end of a sentence." Curiously, the oldest stylebook I have, the 1995 edition, does not contain such direct instructions.
The most detailed explanation I could find as to why we all, at one time or another, have done this wrong comes from Slate.
It starts with the typewriter, which has some deficiencies that are less obvious than the fact that it single-handedly gave rise to the white-out industry.
Typewriters create monospaced type, meaning that every letter, number or character is given an equal space on the page.
"Monospaced type gives you text that looks 'loose' and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately," Farhad Manjoo wrote in Slate. "Hence the adoption of the two-space rule -- on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s."
Now almost all fonts on our computers are proportional, meaning an 'I' gets much less space than an 'M'. There's a lot less white space between characters and words, making it very easy for readers to spot the single space at the end of a sentence.
And when there are two spaces there instead?
Well, your copy looks like it has holes wide enough for a bus to drive through. Doesn't it? See. I'm right.
mmharris@tribpub.com
