I don't think it's so much cultural as technological. Even when typewriters were the norm for regular people to produce things that weren't hand written, offset printing used proportionally spaced fonts and therefore didn't put in "two spaces" (which isn't really even a concept there) between sentences. Now that proportionally spaced fonts are the norm for regular people to produce things that aren't hand written (except, of course, for the Plain Text Luddites!! :-)), the extra space is falling out of favor. I still, out of habit born in Miss Pope's class 40 years ago (Yikes!), just automatically hit the space bar with my thumb twice after the period!!
The trend in writing is to use simple, short declarative sentences and separate them with a punctuation mark and a single space. Since I usually end up using more complex, and therefore more difficult to read, sentences, like this one, which contain appositive phrases and other complicated things, I tend to like the extra space!! Cheers, Don From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of George Kontos Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2010 10:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Treo] Test: sent from Pre 2 blank spaces after the final period of a sentence is the standard format when typing English. Visually, it separates the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. As several people pointed out, apparently this format is not adhered to as strictly as in the past because of various cultural changes in communication methods (using a computer instead of a typewriter, texting, etc). George -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] <mailto:treo%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:treo%40yahoogroups.com> ] On Behalf Of Vishal Sheth Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2010 10:33 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:treo%40yahoogroups.com> Subject: Re: [Treo] Test: sent from Pre Any reason why two spaces? On Mar 13, 2010 9:00 PM, "John Messeder" <[email protected] <mailto:jmesseder%40comcast.net> > wrote: Which is why publishers got away from it. Two characters is another quarter inch, five is a word, and pretty soon you're talking inches of column. Try it in a word processor sometime. Type a page with 2-space and then search and destroy to 1-space and see how much shorter it gets. On 3/13/2010 8:26 AM, Levi Wallach wrote: > removing those extra spaces can make a big difference ... [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
