Indeed, I am a former book editor.
No, you haven’t. I’ve been publishing in professional journals for 10 years, and no editor has ever asked me to single space after periods until just this year. Just because it is important to **Walloon **doesn’t mean he should get snippy with people who don’t get exercised over it like he does.
It’s not whether it’s important to me. It’s that a single space after a sentence has been standard in all books, magazines, and newspapers for at least the last hundred years, but some people are acting like it’s something new and they’ve never heard of it until lately. In other words, it’s something they have seen in print* for all their lives*.
According to the Wikipedia article cited above, this is untrue, and in fact, the customs of spacing in professional typesetting has a much more complex history. The article explicitly states that books published in the post-war period in America typically used “English spacing,” that is, double-spacing between sentences. It also claims that Tx and LaTex both insert double spaces between sentences regardless of how much whitespace the typist inserts. (Unless specifically set to “French spacing.”) It appears that single-spacing everything only became the norm in professional type-setting sometime in the last 50 years, possibly much more recently.
Something I read fairly regularly (the Denver Post? the local paper? a magazine?) uses a hair space between sentences. Drives me crazy whenever I read it, whatever it is!
The Wikipedia article is wrong, but even the Wikipedia article agrees that single-spacing as been the norm for the last fifty years.
It’s simple, a lot of us have been taught to double-space. When we read things, most of us probably just assume that there’s a double-space after a period. We’re probably seeing what we expect to see instead of what really is.
But really, does it make that big a difference? Why is it a big deal?
I’ll confess. When preparing work for publication, we evil editors have been quietly removing those double spaces after periods, all these years.
It’s okay. Double spaces after periods made clunky old monospaced fonts easier to read. If your favorite font is monospaced, or you love pounding on an old typewriter after a brisk outing on your velocipede, we understand. We simply convert your work into gorgeous, proportional fonts and strip out those spaces.
Now that my eyes are old, karma slaps me hard for every time I tried to fit more print to page by using tiny fonts, kerned into obscene tightness. Let that be of comfort to you.
This. It looks better to my mind, as you said. Neater. (Well, that and again, I too was taught that way.) I had no idea it was now “out.”
I know that Wikipedia isn’t the most reliable source, but do you have a counter-cite?
And do modern publications use just one width of space (adjusted for justification)? Don’t you use 1/2-em and 1/3-em and narrow and hair spaces? Or is that all old-fashioned? So what is “one” space anyway?
That’s all well and good, but I’m like Nobody; when I look at a magazine or journal article it doesn’t occur to me to wonder if there are two spaces or one after a period. I always assumed there were two. And since, as I noted above, no editor ever asked me to single space after a period, I was never disabused of this notion. Getting pissy because people aren’t aware of it is like me getting pissy about people not being aware of semantic holism. It might matter to me, but other people don’t really give a rat’s ass about it, and I can’t really blame them for that.
If you have always assumed that magazines and newspapers double space after periods, when in fact they have been single spacing, then would it be accurate to say that you can’t readily discern the difference (at least not without closer, meticulous inspection)? If so, then does it follow that double spacing is not actually any more readable, if you have been reading with perfect clarity what you supposed to be double-spaced text?
No, I haven’t? That’s an interesting assertion, since you don’t know me. My editors started asking me to leave out the 2nd space (and pointed out its lack in the style guides) in the early 80s when I started writing for magazines. When I started editing other people’s work, I created macros that removed the superfluous spaces so I didn’t have to do it by hand, but I still told people about it.
It doesn’t really take a close inspection. If your columns are reasonably wide and sentences aren’t overly long, the extra spaces produce unsightly “rivers” running through the text, and little blobs of whitespace.
I do it because that’s how I was taught to do it back in high school. Haven’t met a teacher or supervisor who seemed to be bothered enough by it to comment on it, and from what people tell me, sometimes word processor programs are just set up to correct the double-space faux pas automatically.
That’s my thinking exactly. I was trying to ask Sophistry and Illusion a pointed series of questions.
I used to double space after sentences all the time but got out of the habit when I started blogging and the second space disapeared.
My wife saw me writing an email the other day and asked me where the second space was.
I suppose it is not more readable. But I haven’t been among those asserting that it is. My only beef is with those who feel the need to get rude about what is essentially a trivial issue.
I was responding to this from you:
As I said, I went 10 years before any editor, copyeditor, proofreader, or anyone ever asked me to single space.
Whatever. It’s not worth anyone getting their knickers in a twist over, which is why I shared **kayT’s **reaction to **Walloon’s **unecessary snark.