Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
As a non English speaking person that's very interesting. In Swedish
there has never been an extra space required and I started to learn
English at school in 1975, and nobody ever mentioned an extra space.
So exactly when did this change from being required to NOT being
required?
I don't rercall the dates, but in about 1954 when I was about ten and
first being taught formal writing, the two spaces were regarded as
required, and by the time I'd been working for a few years (early
1970's) it was vanishing. The best suggestion I'd have would be looking
up different editions of references like Kate Turabian's works, where an
"official" style guide was published, and seeing when that changed. I
think her primary one was called something like "Handbook of the English
Language" when I first encountered it in the late 50's.
By the way, I certainly wouldn't call you "non-English speaking" -- you
do far better than most of us for whom it is our first (and often only)
language.
On the other hand, in 1975 we didn't use computers at school so maybe
that's why they didn't mention anything about spaces…
And I am curious about another thing as well: I have noticed that many
people writing in English adds an extra space right before a ”!” and a
”?”, which is very ugly and at least in Swedish very wrong. Has that
been required too in the past?
Never to my knowledge, and I agree it's both ugly and wrong! I've more
often seen extra spaces between such punctuation and a closing
parenthesis, but again never formally recommended.
Johnny Rosenberg
Sweden ≠ Switzerland…
2009/12/5 James Wilde <[email protected]>:
Sorry to barge in here, but in normal usage you are right, Michael, that two
spaces after a full stop and colon are no longer required.
However, I have been told that manuscripts intended for printing should still
have two spaces after full stop and colon, to make it easier for the typesetter
to see the difference between full stop and comma, and colon and semi-colon
respectively. For this reason also, it is traditional for manuscripts to be in
a fixed font, and courier 12 pt is the norm, both in the film world (where it
isn't intended for printing of course) and in the book world. I must admit
that, like John Gilchrist, it is so ingrained in my system, that I
automatically put two spaces in the appropriate places, but then I've been
typing for nearly fifty years, so it's had time to become a habit!
I'm not saying that J K Rowling wouldn't have been published if she'd sent her
manuscript in Arial or something, but she no doubt found it easier to stick to
the rules.
//James
On Dec 5, 2009, at 12:05 , Michael Adams wrote:
On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 03:59:59 -0600
Came this utterance formulated by John Gilchrist to my mailbox:
*How can I automatically place two spaces between the period at the
end of a sentence, and the begining of the next sentence.*
Firstly - two spaces at the end of each sentence is no longer a
requirement of English.
But if you insist that it is a requirement of yours, use "Edit - Find
and Replace" then replace ". " with ". ". It can also be suitably
ammended to cater for question and exclamation marks.
What i would have done is not copied and pasted but "File - Open"ed the
.DOC files instead. They will open fine in OpenOffice.org.
NOTE to all - If copy and paste does strip extra white spaces, is this
behaviour expected or counterable?
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