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One space or two?

5/6/2015

3 Comments

 
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Interesting question.

I was taught to leave two spaces after a full stop, but that was in the days of manual typewriters (ooops - showing my age there!).

Typewriter characters had a monospaced type, which means every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space, giving you text that looked gappy with a lot of white space between characters and words. If you think of the difference in size between a lower case i or number 1 to a capital M or W you can see what I mean. It was harder to spot the spaces between sentences, so it was more usual to leave two (sometimes even three or four!) spaces after a full stop to make the end of sentences clearer.

When electric typewriters and computers came into being in the 1970s the characters used proportional fonts, which means the typeface contained characters of varying widths (Courier being the one major exception). These are easier to read and look more professional.

Because we now all use these modern fonts there is no need to leave two spaces after a full stop as it no longer enhances readability. This standard was adopted because editors, typographers, writers and others settled on it after years of experience.

Hard habit to break though ...

3 Comments
Leigh link
10/6/2015 08:35:29 am

Hi Mary, this post struck a chord with me. It got me thinking just how many habits I have picked up training on a manual typewriter! I trained on my mum's old Olivetti and I still give my shift key more abuse than the others.

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Mary
10/6/2015 11:19:13 am

Thanks for your comment Leigh - glad it's not just me left who learnt on a manual!

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Trannies Western Australia link
10/11/2022 06:59:23 am

Your the bestt

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    Mary's musings ... 
    (Mary Bate)
     

    Freelance proofreader, copy editor and teaching assistant.

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