Smoo chided me the other day for putting two spaces after a period when proofing her homework. She informed me that, while that may have been the rule waaaaay back in the day, it was no longer done, and that one space now suffices. The little gremlin in my brain that is in charge of making sure that arbitrary rules are obeyed was not pleased by this news. How could periods, question marks, exclamation points and colons — far more weighty in their import — be given the same berth as commas and semicolons?! It was bad enough when comma rules became less rigid, but now this?
From a rather interesting (to me) viewpoint, this change makes sense. The bulk of a person’s portfolio is, from now on, going to be accessed via the web, and web servers do not — unless tediously instructed otherwise — print more than one space in succession. For that reason, along with the ubiquitous nature of variable-width fonts as explained by Grammar Girl, Chicago and <a href=“http://www.mla.org/style_faq3>MLA stipulate that only a single space should follow end-of-sentence punctuation, while APA went from adopting the single space rule in APA5, to allowing, with the publication of APA6, the double space in drafts but giving printers/publishers final say at the time of imprint. The punctuation/space topic is so convoluted, it seems, that WikiPedia has a whole article on end-of-sentence spacing.
As always, I am amused by the heated nature of the pro and con arguments for either side. Pedants in a huff are so cute, aren’t they? Well, they are until you are the one writing the paper, and then the instinct to strangle trumps all. Why did these standards come to mean so much? The best teachers/editors/etc. are flexible in this regard, as well as in all things format-related, as they know that content is king, and that it takes more than an extra space to detract from the substance of a work. The amount of angst caused — for students, graders, editors and publishers — by arbitrary rules is far less trivial than the rules themselves. As long as someone has the brain to write good content, they will have the brain to format it in a legible way, no? Can we not trust this?
I know. People getting huffy over things like punctuation rules are just as “cute” as frothy pedants. What can I say. Froth on!
For what it’s worth, the isssue, from what they say in my typography courses, actually is one of typography rather than grammar. What I’ve been taught is that the reason for the change is very simple: any modern computer software automatically creates the white space equivalent to the second manual space, but gauged appropriately to the typeface (point size, etc.). Adding the second manual space just creates extra white space.
Now, there’s actually a *very* good reason why you don’t want that extra white space, as a typographer. Any page of type is actually equivalent to a pointillist painting — the eye sees dark and light as patterns. The goal of good typography is to create as even a texture of black on the page as possible, so that the eye perceives the page as a single, uniform grey tone. When you have the extra white spaces, they create holes in that grey tone, which can, in turn create unsightly “rivers” of white flowing through your page.
Look at a page of Smoo’s homework with, and then without, the double spaces. Squint until it blurs. You’ll quite possibly see what I mean. So, modern software is attempting to compensate for the trained eye of a typographer as best it can, by making the spaces after all punctuation scaled as appropriately as possible, and the grammarians are slowly catching on.
:)
Tala-the-potentially-pedantic
(who admittedly did not have time to follow and read your links, and may therefore be not only pedantic but annoyingly repetitively redundant, and apologizes should that be the case)
Sweetie, you made me choke on my coffee! Mike just got after me about double-spacing after a period a couple days ago. I am with you. Old habits die hard. (Notice I still double-space…)