And you’re changing those curly quotation marks to prime marks, right? There’s a difference between straight quotation marks ( ’ " ) and prime marks ( ′ ″ ).
Not just American. It has definitely changed with technology.
My mother began working as a typist in the early 60’s. 1 space for a comma, two for a period, mainly to clarify that a period was meant, not a comma.
To justify a letter, she had to count the characters and spaces in each line and work out how many (and where) extra spaces had to be added into the text. All paragraphs were indented and they only had spaces between them if it meant the letter would have a better balance on the page.
I was also taught the two spaces rule in typing class, but didn’t have to worry about line justification since the electronic typewriters would work that out before printing each line (it was a mark of pride to have the typewriter continuously printing, because it meant that you were typing faster than the machine could return the carriage and print each line). It wasn’t until the late 80’s when I was working exclusively on computer that the 2 space rule was officially rescinded in the government department where I was working.
That was the same time that we were told not to indent paragraphs. AFAIK, the lines between paragraphs are still a matter of preference or aesthetics.
To give her due credit, my mother picked up on those style changes much faster than I did, even though she’d worked her way from typist to manager.
Wow, I had no idea I was such a dinosaur at age 30. Are people really rolling their eyes at me a la Bosstone when they see my two spaces? Yeah, retraining myself would be tough. This is really an eye-opening thread, though. I never knew I was in the minority.
I, like several others in this thread, am apparently the victim of an early 1990s typing class.
Typographer here. My quick answer is “define ‘space’.” My long answer is that once you take into account the particular font and the particular characters adjacent to the space . . . sometimes one space is sufficient, sometimes two are necessary, and usually it comes to around 1.5 spaces.
And don’t even ask for my ***real ***long answer.
How many times you hit the space bar when typing something.
I, for one, would love to read your real long answer.
Another one-space-after-period fanatic here. I have a macro for removing extra spaces and have Word set to correct extra spaces when it spell checks. As a technical writer and editor, I use that macro a lot.
If you’re not indenting your paragraph starts, the blank line between paragraphs is an absolute must for readability. You can’t expect the wrapping to always produce a short line right before you start the next paragraph to clue your reader in that a new one has started.
*** Ponder
After having read that article, “space” no longer has meaning. Space space space space – it’s just some sounds now.
I thought Maggenpye was saying that paragraphs were not to be manually indented because a paragraph format would take care of that, if needed.
Same here!
Two spaces 4 life, yo! 
Yup. That’s why I use LaTeX for most of my writing. It doesn’t care what I do with whitespace, tabs or whatever (except that a blank line between text indicates a new paragraph). It typesets things the way the document style tells it to.
Yup.
Huh. At twenty I’m probably one of the youngest in this thread–I’ve never used a typewriter for any practical purpose–and I use two spaces. Actually, I wasn’t sure if I did or not (and I felt too self-aware to actively try it out) so I had to check past documents. I don’t ever remember specifically learning to do this, but I must have been taught somehow.
That has ALWAYS bugged me about you.
(Jus’ joke :p)
Personally, I use four spaces. You little bastards are* all * wrong.
Your terms are acceptable.
As everyone here runs on about their personal preferences, I’d just like to offer a word for someone we all seem to have forgotten:
THE READER.
You might all want to track down the SEC’s great handbook for writing in Plain English. It reminds all of us–especially lawyers like me–that the object of all this writing is to convey ideas to a reader. There’s a thought!
Turns out readers have a significantly higher comprehension/retention level when there’s a definite break after a sentence ends. And “justified” lines (which are actually left-and-right justified) are badly handled by non-typesetting computers. So one gets varying word spacing, which makes it even harder to read text. When you add single spacing after periods to that bad situation, you can get paragraphs in which the prior line has larger spaces between words than the space after the sentence ends. This literally throws off the rhythm at which readers scan a line, decreasing comprehension.
So let’s all think about the readers, huh? Double-space after periods, please. And turn off that appalling “justification” --not done the right way anyhow–REAL typesetters use hyphens to make the word spacing come out okay. We’re hoping to convince people with the power of our ideas, not the tidiness of our pages when viewed at a distance (“Oh look how nicely the edges line up! She MUST be right!”)
Peterson’s Law applies to this post: You Can’t Proofread Your Own Stuff. I know there’s a typo in hree somehwer…I just can’t SEE it.
I use two spaces after a period because when it matters, I want to have the two spaces there. When it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. If I’m writing comments for code I’m writing, the extra period makes it more readable. If I’m writing in LaTeX or a SDMB reply box, the output is unaffected, but again, it’s easier for me to read while I’m writing.
Frankly, I don’t see any reason why I should change my typing habits to using only one space following a period. If your software has a hard time handling it, get better software.
Okay. Even the typographers have failed to clearly explain WHY it’s best to use one space after a period.
Computers justify type (align both the left and right margins) by making all of the spaces between the words in the line slightly wider. You can hardly see the difference in lines that are several inches wide. With narrower columns, though, the wordspacing can become more pronunced, especially if the last word in the line cannot be hyphenated.
What happens when the sentences have two spaces after the periods is that the space is widened twice as much as the other word spaces when the program is trying to justify the line. This leaves big, ugly gaps.
People clinging to outmoded typewriter rules is why personal computers have brought about such a flood of crappy looking homemade newsletters, brochures and other printed materials that people used to have to give to professionals to print.
Well, the question is how many people ever produce justified text on a computer for others to read?
Possibly for newsletters or the like, but that’s about all I can think of that would be common. Papers, letters, manuscripts, emails, posts. Almost everything that people do is not justified.
Maybe the two-spacers here can tell me what they write that would require justification or two spaces at the end of a sentence. I’d be very surprised if more than a few specialized examples are given. (Even newsletters, as mentioned above, are often in two or three columns to a page and then you definitely would not want two spaces after a period even for justified text.) Most of the people sounded as if they used two spaces for every single thing they write.
There is no real world example I can think of that would require that or read more comprehensibly if that were done.
You can use Word totally proficiently to justify text with proportional fonts. I would never under any circumstances use two spaces with a proportional font in Word, and that’s for everything up to and including actual books, which I have produced that way. (Real typesetters use fractional spacing, not hyphens, to set justified text, BTW.)
You need to show me an actual example of a two spaced text that looks better before I will entertain the idea. Maybe there is something specialized in law writing, which I’m not familiar with, that works that way. In the rest of the writing world, which I’m intimately familiar with, there is nothing.