One space or two?
January 16, 2011 Filed under Blog, Featured, Uncategorized, Writing
Russ Schumacher and I have been discussing the current online battle between those who advocate one space between sentences and two spaces. The debate started with Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then was picked up by The Atlantic, citing Tom Lee.
I have to admit that my typing instructor in seventh grade taught us to use two spaces, and it is a habit I can’t break. It is nice that some publishing software like LaTeX adjusts automatically and makes the result look professionally typeset, although Word is not quite so clever.
So, what are your thoughts?
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Please make it easier on the reader and use two spaces. Do we not have enough computer power and data storage capability to do so?
Matt, although two spaces may help readability in emails with constant-width characters, professionally typeset text will have that single space. So, what do we do? I don’t think anyone was complaining about space or power. If that were the case, we’d have full-resolution radiosonde data. 😉
The two spaces rule is a relic of fixed-pitch type. I learned typing on IBM Selectrics and was taught that rule. But all the professional editors I spoke to responded with basically the same position as the Slate article. It took me forever to change, but I now use a single space after a period.