One of the most important and burning questions of our day is: When you end a sentence, is there one space after the period before the next sentence or are there two spaces? Wars could be fought over this. Not because the space or lack of it really matters so much but because, either way, somebody's paradigm is being shaken. People don't like it when you mess with their paradigms. It makes them feel like the world is an uncertain place. They need their space(s).
Back in the day before keyboarding (i.e. computer keyboards), schools provided typing classes where 25 to 30 pupils sat in rows and rhythmically wore out their fingers banging away on Underwood Fives or IBM Selectrics. Those manual typewriters were better than fingertip pushups to build up the muscles in the forearm. If you were there, you remember being solemnly taught that you always put two character spaces between a period and the first word of a new sentence. Always. It was a law of nature and nature's God. Points were docked if you didn't. I had to be careful and make sure I got in that extra space. It was easy to skip one when I was typing as fast as I could. That, and I constantly mistyped and as "nad." I still do that. But Word knows my tendency so it autocorrects for me. I love technology. Mrs. Gonnaretiresoon taught us that the reason for the two space rule was to improve the readability of the text. It provided a visual break which helped the reader to group the ideas in a sentence more efficiently before moving on to the next one. Typewriters used a monospace font, the character I takes as much space on the page as the character M. So you typed two spaces at the end of the sentence to create a visual break. The little gap was a comprehension aid.
That made sense. We bought it completely. Then along came the word processor and its proportionally spaced fonts. The fonts were now spaced to accommodate character width, position in the word, and space AFTER the period (or the Full Stop for any Brits out there). Two spaces were no longer needed after the period. This little magical feat was brought to us by a word processing miracle called kerning.
That didn't matter. Mrs. G had drilled it into us. It was a fact of life. It was dogma. And we were trained to do it that way. Our brains didn't accept that we were writing a new sentence until our thumbs actually hit the spacebar twice. And that was the way it had always been done.
Except, it wasn't.
I also learned the two space rule because I, too, was a student of Mrs. G. But when I submitted my first manuscript for publication it came back with a polite request from the publishing house to remove the double spaces between sentences and then resubmit. Publishers have always used one character space in books and magazines. I went back to newspapers and periodicals from 1888 to 2000 to prove this to myself. I looked through books and documents. A Gutenberg Bible wasn't available to personally handle but from a jpeg on the internet it looked like Johannes was a one space publisher as well. They all, with few exceptions, used a single character space between sentences. A core formatting guide prepared by a publishing expert with a parvenu occupational designation of Typographic Consultant has all but assured that this rule is THE rule.
Now we turn to the newest research paid for by your hard-earned tax dollar…double character spacing between sentences is actually bad for you. Okay, not you, the writer – but bad for the person who ends up reading your document. I'm sure there are plenty of people who wanted to go out and hang themselves after reading something I wrote. But the actual problem is that it puts a strain on your vision. Take a full page of text from a document containing double spaces between sentences and hold it out a few feet from your face. Now squint. You will see rivers of white space going up and down the page. Studies have shown that the rivers of white space cause headaches and eyestrain in many readers. They lead the eye away from the text. This is hardly noticeable to the reader because they are concentrating on the meaning. But over time this constant readjusting of focus causes strain and fatigue.
This eye fatigue happens at a much slower rate when tested on documents with a single space after the period. That's why you can read a novel all afternoon, even though the type can be much smaller and condensed, compared to a much lesser duration for memorandum and SOPs. And all along you thought it was just the content material. It's as much a matter of readability as it is appeal and engagement. Trapped white space can make you woozy. Just tell the employee health nurse that you are suffering from White Space Wooze. There may even be a code for it.
We've covered tradition, best practices and medicine. Let's look at the recognized authorities on grammar and format. The Chicago Manual of Style, The APA Style book and the Modern Language Association (MLA) all recommend using one space after a period. And to emphasis the point, the Chicago Manual of Style declares this not once, but three times:
- A period marks the end of a declarative or an imperative sentence. It is followed by a single space.
- A single character space, not two spaces, should be left after periods at the ends of sentences (both in manuscript and in final, published form).
- In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks.
So Mrs. G was wrong. But don't blame her. She learned it from her typing teacher, Miss Slaghoople, who taught back when typists would have to hit the font bar with a rock to typeset. Which is ironic (or is it coincidental?), because ancient languages were written without any breaks between words. Then again, they didn't use punctuation at all; a species tendency that is resurfacing with the popularity of texts and tweets. Nobody knows when or why the double space myth set in to the common knowledge base. Typing instructors taught it religiously while all the while oblivious to the magnitude of the single spaced material around them. But that's societal nature. Conventional wisdom is hard to change – after all, we still believe George Bush ran to the Supreme Court in the 2000 election (Gore did), that tomatoes are vegetables (scientifically classified as a fruit) and that caviar actually tastes good (blech!). Today, technical material is single spaced. I mean go ahead and try and get two spaces to show on a browser address or while creating an HTML webpage. Can't do it unless you know the cheats. But many non-technical writers still author documents with two spaces. Even with writing convention against it they do it anyway. Why? Because they really do believe their documents look better. So maybe it is ultimately a style choice. Using one space is now the most widely proscribed style, but ultimately it is really about communication and design. Is the design of the document (spacing, font, justification, etc) effective? Does it look the way YOU want it to look?
The Gregg Reference has this to say about it:
Now that the standards of desktop publishing typically apply to all documents produced by computer, the use of one space is recommended after the punctuation that occurs at the end of a sentence. Yet this standard should not be mechanically applied.
In all cases, the deciding factor should be the appearance of the breaks between sentences in a given document. If the use of one space does not provide enough of a visual break, use two spaces instead.
Style manuals are good guidelines but they are not the law. Ultimately the style choice is left to the writer or the publisher. And just in case you didn't notice, I wrote this whole thing with 2 spaces between sentences. But you couldn't, could you? The layout won't allow it. White space is not allowed.
Now, just don't tell a secretary that the QWERTY keyboard was actually designed to slow the typist down so they didn't jam up the keys with their speed. But that's another story…
No comments:
Post a Comment