Hello Roelof, and Gavin, On Tuesday, January 07, 2003, 3:20 AM, you wrote:
R> Hallo Gavin, GS>> ... As you can see from this post, I use the GS>> old-fashioned convention of sticking two spaces at the start of a GS>> sentence. However, if I were to reformat this paragraph with ALT-L, GS>> those spaces would be reduced to one each. GS>> Why is this so? R> You'd need to ask the authors that. I think that this "one space" between the full stop (period) and the capital (upper case) letter of the following sentence is a convention agreed upon in most word processors and probably the authors of TB! are just following the word-processor programmers. I first learned about this difference when a friend was writing her doctoral dissertation in the mid-1990s. Her university committee wanted her to follow the standard set up long before word processors existed. In the United States, the style manual accepted by most colleges and universities was that written by Kate L. Turabian and published by the University of Chicago Press. Even before Turabian, the *Chicago Manual of Style* (used by many newspapers and book publishers in the United States) followed this usage. My friend's committee rejected her first draft of her dissertation on the sole ground of the single space after the period. She had to manually go through her entire manuscript (no formatting option to add in the space after the period because of its use in such abbreviations as Mr., Mrs., etc.--and so on) and put in the extra space before she could proceed toward her degree! I think that since then many colleges and universities have modified their requirements. What do the rest of the readers of this thread think (or know for sure? :) ) ? GS>> Must I surrender my beloved sentence layout? R> Only if you'd like to reformat blocks using Alt-L, Alt-R or Alt-J I think the computer programmers--mostly engineers and other geeks with only the most passing acquaintance with the word-oriented world of literature, newspapers, and writers--have taken the football and run with it. To mix my figures of speech, I think the language is lassoed and hog-tied, and us old-timers are being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Myself, I gave up long ago. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." :) All the best to you both, and to all my fellow tbudl subscribers. -- Mary The Bat! 1.61 on Windows XP 5.1 2600 Service Pack 1 -- Mary Bull The Bat 1.61 on Windows XP 5.1 2600 Service Pack 1 ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
