- When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.
Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing.
While the author provides a lot of evidence for why we should only use one space, does it really matter? Does the message still get across the same way, or does the distraction of two spaces vs one get in the way of the transferring of the message?
humanodon is right: slow news day. I'm not so worried about Farhad Manjoo's space obsession, but this line gave me a pause: His previous article was called Why Men Should Wear Makeup.I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.
Tongue-in-cheek no doubt, but these little jokes come from somewhere. My guess is that he does have a collection of melancholy poetry. The title poem is called "The Emptiness Within." Rather than fill his big emptiness with drugs, alcohol, video games, poetry, or obsessive love relationships, he constructs superior-sounding typography articles to show how smart and informed he is. I worry for him and his emptiness. I will write him and ask for his poem. I'll keep you posted how that goes.
I had the same thought. I read How To Make Friends And Influence People not too long ago and one of the things that really struck me was the stuff about tapping into the ways that people feel important. Bitterness has a way of surfacing when people don't want it to and it seems to me that a person who has the opportunity to soapbox a bit will naturally also potentially have an outlet for their individual bitterness. Who knows though. Maybe he was robbed by a poet, or a poet killed his parents or something. I'd actually be pretty interested to peek inside the brain of the person who wrote this very particular article, if only to see if this person is as truly concerned about minutia as they appear to be in this particular piece of writing. Heck, I'd gladly write some bullshit about punctuation for a paycheck.Tongue-in-cheek no doubt, but these little jokes come from somewhere. My guess is that he does have a collection of melancholy poetry. The title poem is called "The Emptiness Within."
Rather than fill his big emptiness with drugs, alcohol, video games, poetry, or obsessive love relationships, he constructs superior-sounding typography articles to show how smart and informed he is.
I worry for him and his emptiness. I will write him and ask for his poem. I'll keep you posted how that goes.
I am very concerned about grammatical minutiae, but I restrain myself. I could easily write a short article about the use of "number" vs. "amount" though. It is my current grammatical soapbox. Or "fewer" vs. "less." These are grammatical errors people make constantly. However, I appreciate that no one cares for being corrected, especially in terms of grammar and spelling, and if I'm disagreeing with someone, what they are trying to say is much more important than the little errors they may make while conveying their point. It distracts from an argument to focus on spelling.
Oh, grammar bugs me sometimes too, but this is not even grammar. This is an issue of typography. It's not even an accidental error that the writer is arguing, but a systematized conceptual error rooted in what is by and large, a quirk of outmoded technology. From my perspective, dude is making a mountain out of a molehill because people haven't changed as quickly as he thinks they should because books exist that inform people of the current convention, a convention which no on else seems to place any sort of emphasis on. I'm not at all an advocate for bullying of any stripe, and certainly not of child abuse, but I firmly believe that some people should have gotten their asses kicked more (or even just once, perhaps badly) as children. Now, had the article been framed more along the lines of, "hey, I'm a huge typography nerd and as such, I wonder if my readers were aware of the convention around spaces after periods or full stops? Here's an interesting story of how the convention was arrived at, blah blah blah, here are some other interesting facts about typography, etc." then, cool. Maybe I'm just getting tired of the near-mandatory superiority and snark of internet articles, but a high and mighty article about typography is apparently where I draw the line. To the writer, I say, "No, nerd of the obscure. Lick my nuts and do it well since you're so concerned with details, period, space, space.
Aw, man, I just figured out why I thought I'd read this article before. The publication date on this link through me off, despite the note about Assange at the end. I had. I suppose it is his perspective, or the "voice" he is using to draw readers - come to me, enraged English majors! Your greivances are not unheard! . I read the makeup article. He seems like an interesting - perhaps offbeat - sort of person. I agree it's not a big deal. Mom's a confirmed two-spacer and I'm a one-spacer, mainly because I never found it conducive to my "groove" to hit the space bar twice in a row after a sentence. You did forget an end quote, though :)
After I read this, I gave the one space thing a try. I think it would take a while to get used to, as two spaces is almost a reflex at this point. Perhaps those many hundreds of thousands of double spaces over the years have contributed to my legendary thumb-wrestling abilities. As for that end quote, maybe I'm not done yet! And anyway, ahem . . . and :) I get that people demand a certain standard of written English and that's fine, but with the internet it almost seems compulsive. I think this is odd, since creating text is nearly as natural as speaking for a great many people. People who have distinct speech patterns and often use regional (and social) variations of English that do not conform to the standard. For me, as long as spelling is correct(ish) and the grammar isn't interfering with meaning, I'm usually fine with it. A formal piece of writing is a different matter, but most of the writing (or typing, I guess) isn't formal. And of course, with formal writing there is typically an editing process to ensure that standards are followed, so all that outrage and venting about people writing "properly" on the internet seems so very silly and masturbatory.The publication date on this link through me off
Your greivances are not unheard!
Business Insider, January 31, 2014: SLOW NEWS DAY The thing is, it's pretty tough to spot the difference between one space and two spaces with most fonts unless there are a whole lot of words on the page. And even so, the article never touches on any real negative effects of there being two spaces after a period, except in terms of what typographers have decided is correct.
Right. I really don't think it matters. Different strokes (or spaces) for different folks. Although, I would like to see if there really is any sort of subtle aesthetic difference.
Well, what do you mean by "benefit"? There is no technological advantage, other than not needing a supply of electricity and the inability for whatever is written to be intercepted electronically (unless someone installs a keylogger on it, which has happened in the past, though of course not to me). Personally, I like the immediacy of it. I type and there it is on the page. I don't need to print anything because the act of typing actualizes a product. I also like the feel of it. Pounding away on the keyboard makes a real product, so the work is more tangible. Then of course, there is also the fact that it is imperfect, which means that I have to think about what I'd like to write instead of barfing whatever trickles down my brain stem and into my fingers, or else waste ink and paper. For someone who writes, different writing implements, like different pens and different typewriters, or even different computer keyboards (for example, an ergonomic keyboard rather than a laptop keyboard) is akin to a painter with different brushes, paint knives, palettes, canvases, paper, boards, etc. In my experience, the way that something is produced can have an effect on exactly what is produced. To use another analogy, musicians might think similarly in terms of music theory, but the instrument they play will influence the music they create. For example, on a saxophone it's really easy to create complex runs of notes and to play notes very quickly due to the setup of the valves and keys, unlike say, a slide trombone. On a computer, I can take whole passages of text and easily chop them up and edit them on the fly until I hit on something. On a typewriter, I have to think about what I want ahead of time and generally proceed with more consideration as I work toward shaping things toward their final form. On a manual, this is slowed down even further and there is a lot of room for error, which can sometimes lead to interesting new ideas.
Nostalgia would be the big factor for me. Although I'm more nostalgic for my dad's old laptop that was the size of a briefcase. I used to write stories in its what I think was word perfect. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen and even though it just had basic word processing I wanted to use it for something. Sad that I never really got into writing; I used to write stories and read them in front of class in grade 3.
I've always been an avid two-spacer. My English teacher taught me that in high school and I never questioned it. Just assumed to keep using two-spaces. I've never been called out in it in my writing, whether that be online, in work, or in university. I can understand why some people prefer one space. Doesn't seem like a big deal to me though, I think it should just be a matter of preference. On a completely unrelated note, a video with basically the hubski logo was at the end of the article:
I've always used two spaces since I was taught to type in third grade, but a couple of months ago, I installed Lyx, intending to start to use LaTeX. Part of the settings are that it prevents two spaces at the end of a sentence, and will literally say "two spaces disallowed" or something like that because I guess it handles spacing automatically. I pretty quickly dropped my two-space habit, and now I'm happy that I did because it gains me a teensy bit of time. Marginal gains, but still, a gain's a gain. Now, hitting the space bar twice feels unnatural and redundant.
Similar story to yours. The article seems to have a sort of humorous tone to it, but it was interesting to read it presented as a natural law, like this is information critical to the foundations of human communication.
Haha, ya. The Manual of Typography, with all-due-respect, isn't exactly revealing a critical flaw to how we self-organize and share information. I'm using two-spaces now. Can you still understand me? Are you perturbed by the extra space so much that I become incomprehensible?
FYI, the two spaces become one space in your comment due to HTML's "feature" of automatic concatenation of spaces in p tags. If you check the source of this page, you'll see that the spaces are actually there, and it's not Hubski's fault (as I had first assumed when I realized that spaces were concatenated on this site).
would preserve the space. <pre> </pre>
Oh that's interesting. I've never even noticed that. To be honest, I just don't care about the two-space or one-space thing. I'm cool with either.
Ya I suppose. It's kind of funny to read/hear people get so passionate for something so trivial.
Ha, that's exactly what I thought and I just assumed that's what it was until I read the title of the video.
Fuck that. Until you have control over the font your words are rendered in, you are dealing with a monospaced font. Considering every browser and email client handles text differently, you use two spaces. If you're working in InDesign you can fixate on it. If you're working in Chrome? Word autocorrected sentence spacing to two from the first instance it corrected grammar through Word 2000 at least. In applications that allow justified text, providing two spaces tells the software to give that "space" more weight. Amusingly enough, the linked article has bigger spaces between words than between sentences in many cases. Tell that to Reddit, 4chan, or bash.org.Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s.
Spent four years of my fucking life in ID fixating on spaces after periods, kerning, miniscule widths of picas ... now it's ingrained. Curse.If you're working in InDesign you can fixate on it.
I personally don't care too much one way or the other regarding spacing. I have never found it to be much of an issue as far as readability goes. What I do have a problem with is the constant bickering over which way is right. I have had teachers make me go back and change entire papers to fit their standard. Because I don't ever see a happy decision being made, I wish people would at least accept both ways of doing it. Nevertheless, I might end up sending this article to a few of my two-spacing friends.
I've always thought that two spacing was an issue in trying to make page length quotas. I've always done single spacing...just because. But to have a teacher make you redo a whole essay is just goofy.
I agree. My parents are two-spacers because "that's what they were taught and damnit, thats the way it should be!" So every time they read my single spaced papers they point it out to me. I feel like it's a pointless argument that does nothing but create quarrels.