I finally met the guy who got outvoted on the “two spaces after a period” thing. He’s teaching my editing class this week, and today he decided to get on his soapbox about it.

The instructor is one of the many people all over the United States who was ordered in typing class to add two spaces after every period. It was burned into our brains. There are teachers still out there who insist that students add two spaces after each sentence simply because that’s the way they were taught. They’re not preparing anyone to function as a writer or an editor who uses current style guides. They’re just thinking, “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them. At least they're learning to type.”

So this morning, he mentioned a provocative article that recently appeared in Slate called “Space Invaders.” The columnist is one of those people who think that everyone who doesn’t subscribe to modern convention is a dinosaur, and was actually shocked to find a group of educated people all at the same dinner table who all still believed that a writer should add two spaces after a period. It alarmed him so much that he wrote this article, the point of which was that monospaced type, which was the reason for the two-space rule in the first place, went out in the seventies, so if we don't all get with the program, we're all archaic idiots.

You might think that if the general thinking on sentence spacing shifted in the early 1990s, this would be a dead issue by now, but there are over two thousand comments on that one article (most of which were responding to the words "you're doing it wrong" with varying degrees of indignance). Personally, I think the reason this subject still gets a rise out of people is that every time an article on grammar (no pun intended) appears in a magazine or a newspaper, it gets glossed over as “too geeky to read” to the point where scores of people who learned to type on a typewriter still have no idea that the “powers that be” have changed their thinking.

My instructor is still one of those people who never saw the harm in keeping the two-space rule. He’s in a real pickle, though – he works for the people who changed the rule back to single spacing between sentences. He says he has gotten into some heated discussions at work about this over the years because he never did see the point of changing a perfectly nice rule that wasn’t hurting anyone. And on top of that, he is married to a copy editor, which creates its own special set of issues after work.

In a way, it is nice to see someone have actual thoughts about his work without blindly following arbitrary rules. So much of editing is "following the rules,” whether or not the rules necessarily make sense. The rules are just there to set a standard. Take that comma I just put after the word “rules.” Should it go inside or outside the quotation marks? Which way makes it look less awkward? You could argue the point for hours on end, but at the end of the day, in American English, CMOS says it still goes inside the quotation marks.

For the record, I like the one-space rule even though I was taught to use two, and I think that comma looks goofy inside the quotation marks.

The whole conversation made the class a little more interesting today – in more ways than one. After hearing the title of the article, one lady in the front of the room is now calling Word’s Find and Replace feature “Search and Destroy.”

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Ture dat

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Reviewed by BillM
March 21, 2011
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I have a sometimes writing partner who cannot seem to abandon the double space thingie. At one time, it was a bone of contention between us, a running bit. Finally, I just started using find and replace in Word with a double space in find and a single space in replace. I do this immediately upon opening one of her pieces for the first time.

Now... if I could just get her to drop the paragraph indents!

Bill

 

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Reviewed by diverson
March 19, 2011
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I'm with you, Lucy. One space after a period is plenty. Strangely, it is the 20-something daughter in my family who wants to stick with the old two-space rule. A tiny conflict when she helps me with overflow writing. I guess it's not simply about age.