One Space Or Two?
I swear, the issue of double versus single spacing after periods came up for me a couple of years ago. I had a new editor, and she asked me to stop putting two spaces after periods. She never said,"Move into the computer age, you old hag," but since I hadn't even been aware that I was doing anything that could be considered incorrect, I did feel a bit twentieth century.
What a pain in the neck it was making the shift. I got over it, though, because I'm still young enough to be trainable.
5 Comments:
I still use two. That's how I learned in my typing class in high school. I just can't get past it. I sure would love to know how you trained yourself to use only one.
I still use two, and then when I am ready to print my mss. for my agent, I do a find, and replace the two spaces with one. He has a lot of formatting rules for me that I had to learn anyway, but that was one of the most basic ones. I felt embarrassed not to know that I was "supposed" to know that.
Yes. I was embarrassed when I found out that I should have known that.
If memory serves me, I removed a lot of spaces by hand in some manuscripts while doing revisions instead of doing some kind of search replacement thing. That was very helpful in breaking me of using two spaces. I occasionally see that I've done it now, but it looks different enough that I catch it at some point.
HTML converts two ordinary spaces into one automatically when formatting words on a screen, so now many people are typing two and getting one.
Like you, I had to retrain myself. But now the old style looks odd.
Isn't this a funny thing? Seems like people are very set in their spacing ways. I learned to use two spaces in computer class as a kid, but now I use one space.
Parker P
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