On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:46:22 -0700, Rick Froman wrote: [snip] >One complaint I have: How am I ever going to get used to going >back to typing two spaces at the end of a sentence?
When I took typing class ub high school, oh several hundred years ago, the habit of putting a double-space after a period was ingrained because, when using a monospaced font (almost all typewriters used such a font until electronic ones showed up), the double space helped to visually identify where one sentence ended and one began. In lab reports, where some students would have extraordinary long sentences, the double-space helped to rapidly identify when it ended (and where a comment about breaking up the sentence into component sentences was made). >I don't do that in e-mail or any other format Now here'a study that's waiting to be done. Given that there are vast databases with typed materials on all sorts of materials (groups.google.com contains the old dejanews.com database which I believe has posts from email lists and Usenet groups going back to the 1980s), how many of the sentences actually have two spaces after a period? Given that typing courses emphasized this practice, I would not be surprised to see that many early posts actually contain double spaces after a period. I would not be surprised to see this practice decline over time. >(I don't imagine too many people will be including two spaces >at the end of a sentence in a tweet given the character limit) since >one of the recent revisions of APA style went from two spaces to >one at the end of a sentence. I guess I will have to set my Word >grammar checker to remind me of that mistake. I have started to >make the change in this e-mail. Don't those spaces between >sentences look ridiculously large? Perhaps some will think so but I think it might be so only in a mono-spaced font like Courier which the mail-archive uses for Tips posts. In a proportional space font (e.g., Times Roman), the spacing is reduced. Of course, this is all a matter of what one is familiar with, and new habit can replace old habits, especially if the new habit is an even older habit. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
