[mso] Re: One or Two Spaces Between Sentences?
- From: "James S. Huggins \(mso\)" <MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2006 22:09:23 -0500
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What is the commonly accepted standard for the number of spaces between
sentences in formal writing? I see that Word 2002 permits selecting "1
space", "2 spaces", or "Don't check" in the Tools menu | Options | Grammar
and
Spelling | Settings.
=======================================
On TYPEWRITERS the standard was TWO spaces.
The reason was that TYPEWRITERS were monospace. Every character took the
same amount of space. A period, an upper case "W", a lower case "i". The use
of two spaces helped to create a distinctive visual gap.
Robin Williams (not the comedian) wrote a GREAT book entitled "The PC is Not
a Typewriter".
The PC is Not a Typewriter
by Robin Williams (Author)
http://snipurl.com/m7vp
She explains this.
The PC (beginning with the Mac and moving into Windows) allows you to
compose documents in ways closer to typesetting than typewriting. As such,
she recommends (strongly) the typesetting standard: one space.
Alas, the typeWRITING standard dies hard.
Here is the Chicago Manual of Style
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/cmosfaq.OneSpaceorTwo.html
A site about desktop publishing
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetwospaces.htm
And more
http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/011803.htm
And an excerpt from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_archive_(spaces_
after_a_full_stop/period)
[excerpt]
As a professional typographer and type designer with over 35 years
experience, I consider placing two spaces after periods to be an
anachronistic typewriter convention perpetuated by high school teachers who
don't know better. I suspect that the reason most people are taught to use
two spaces in school is because their teachers were taught the same thing by
their teachers (who probably used typewriters), who were taught by their
teachers, and so on.
When personal computers finally brought real fonts and the capability to
compose type to the masses, teachers and students who learned typing on
typewriters failed to distinguish between the two. These people were
suddenly introduced to real typography, but lacked training in the
conventions associated with it. As a result double spaces, underlined text,
double hyphens, straight quote marks, non-use of en and em dashes,
apostrophes instead of prime marks, poor kerning, inappropriate leading,
three periods instead of an ellipsis glyph, and most every other sign of bad
typography became common.
Fortunately, this ignorance of standard typographic conventions has not
spilled over into professional publishing. Pick up any magazine, book,
newspaper or professionally published and edited material of any kind, and
look for two spaces after the periods - you won't find them, they're not
there, they don't exist. Professional typographers, designers, copy editors
and printers just don't use use them and never have. In fact, they routinely
remove them during the copy editing process in much the same way that errors
in punctuation and grammar are corrected.
I'm (unfortunately) old enough to have caught the tail end of hot metal
typesetting. In those days there was a style in use at some type houses of
inserting a space and an additional "thin space" after a sentence. The use
of this extra thin space wasn't common and was often dependant upon the
font. I never remember of an instance where someone thought it appropriate
to put two spaces (or even a space and a half) after a period.
It's interesting that there are so many who lament the demise of the period
followed by two spaces - not realizing that it is a convention that never
existed, except in the old typewriter world. - Maylett 23:01, 20 August 2005
(UTC)
[\excerpt]
James S. Huggins
...
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