Too many Kossacks use the dreadfully wrong practice of placing two spaces between sentences instead of one. Unfortunately for the double spacing community, every style manual that you can type a finger at says that writers should only use a single space between sentences. The use of double spacing in today's online environment is nothing more than an atavism that has negative aesthetic consequences.
I remember being taught to use two spaces after a sentence from a typing class I took in high school. This came from a trusted instructor so I never questioned it or researched it further. I would even remind others to do it. No one corrected me in college despite the dozens of papers I handed in this way while earning an English degree!
Soon the typewriter would look like a relic and typing classes would be renamed "Keyboarding." I mention my story because it sounds like a very typical case. People who use double spaces seem to have largely learned it in a typing class or from someone they trusted. Unless challenged, why would anyone research it further? If you research it intending to prove the propriety of the the double space, you will be sadly disappointed.
My earliest recognition of problems with double spacing came when unintentional hanging indents kept showing up in emails I had written. If a sentence ended at a linebreak, the next sentence starting on the next line would be indented by a space. Investigaing the matter, I found that the the word wrap did not adjust for more than one space after a period. The second space I was using would wrap to the next line. Funny, that, I thought. Eventually I grew so annoyed with it that I stopped using double spaces after a sentence in electronic text editors. The hanging indents stopped.
Example of Double Spacing Causing Hanging Indents |
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The first three sentences end at line breaks. The diarist adds two spaces after the period. The word wrap includes the second space on the next line causing the next sentence to indent by a space.
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After I stopped using the double space, I still thought it was the right way. It was just that these darned, stupid, new fangled text editors were programmed wrong! While I felt like I had lost some grand tradition to the modern age, after a time I no longer missed the double space. There was something more elegant in using a single space. Why add two spaces when one will suffice?
Later I began dabbling in my own web publishing. I started leaning HTML, php, MySQL, WordPress et cetera. I learned that a web page's source document can contain any number of consecutive spaces but a browser will simply interpret that empty space as a single space. The only way to render multiple consecutive spaces is to use the ascii code for nonbreaking space in the source document. More on this later.
The next major milestone on my journey was seeing this tweet by @markos.
The article kos linked to runs through some of the history of the quandry quandary but leaves little for "both-sides" journalists:
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period.
Reading the article made me realize that I had started doing the right thing for the wrong reason. But most importantly, that I had learned the double space in a time long after it was obviated by the abandonment of monospace typeset. The typing lab where I learned in high school was decked out with the IBM Selectric which used proportional font. All those papers I handed in during college were written in word processors and printed on laser printers using proportional font. The use of a double space after a sentence which dominated my writing career was never correct to begin with. I'm so glad I don't do it anymore. But I'm so sad every time I see others do it.
Here on Daily Kos, the numbers are staggering. I took an albeit unscientific sample using fifty diarists who had recently posted and found that about forty percent of them used the double space convention. Taking a look at twenty five top diarists, I found about half using double spaces. To repeat, this was an unscientific survey; but it does suggest that the practice is far too common. It is important to note that the front page diarists use a single space.
Do you need more convincing? For what it's worth, there is a kick-ass Wikipedia article about sentence spacing. I know Wikipedia can be a disappointment sometimes, but some articles are extremely well researched with copious references. This is one of them.
Finally, I'll close the loop on the HTML, php thing I mentioned above. I mentioned that html source documents need to have the & n b s p; ascii code for extra space if the intention is to render that space via a browser. Here on DKos, the site's software will preserve a writer's extra spacing by storing the extra spaces as the ascii code. Some blogs don't do this since it takes a bit of extra coding to make it happen. I think the site has it right: preserve the diarist's intentional extra spacing. Even if it means that a double spacer's diaries are strewn with ugly hanging indents, that's the diarist's fault, not the site's.
Sun Jul 03, 2011 at 12:48 AM PT: Thanks to the folks on the Community Spotlight detail for the republish!