[il-talk] Fwd: double spacing after periods

Fri May 8 04:51:39 UTC 2015

Please, have mercy on me!  This habit was more than 50 years in the making.

-----Original Message-----
From: il-talk [mailto:il-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Deborah Kent
Stein via il-talk
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 9:15 PM
To: 'NFB of Illinois Mailing List'
Cc: Deborah Kent Stein
Subject: Re: [il-talk] Fwd: double spacing after periods

How well I remember Touch Typing in Ten Lessons! A man may know the world
without leaving his own home. And yes, I am a slave to habit when it comes
to the double space after a period. As in so much else, one has to change
with the times.

Debbie S.

From: il-talk [mailto:il-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Bill Reif via
il-talk
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2015 8:59 PM
To: NFB of Illinois Mailing List
Cc: Bill Reif
Subject: [il-talk] Fwd: double spacing after periods

Many of us who were blind as children were taught typing using a typewriter
and the book Touch Typing in Ten Lessons.  One of the first things we were
taught after learning to type sentences was to "space twice after a period,
or when the following word begins with a capital letter". Below is a rather
passionate column from Melissa Harris that probably applies to us.  I
suspected this was the case when the proportional font went away, but still
notice a lot of emails that include two spaces after periods if I check.
Those who don't see the formatting would have no reason to look for this
change. This two-space habit will be a hard one to break for some.

Cordially,
Bill

-------- Forwarded Message -------- 

Subject: 

Article from Chicago Tribune Business Section 2015 05 06

Date: 

Thu, 7 May 2015 18:01:28 -0400 (EDT)

From: 

NFB-NEWSLINE Online  <mailto:nfbnewsline at nfb.org> <nfbnewsline at nfb.org>

To: 

William B. Reif  <mailto:billreif at ameritech.net> <billreif at ameritech.net>

Chicago Confidential. One space between sentences, please Don't treat your
writing like a double-wide trailer. One space will do.. Melissa Harris.
Please stop putting two spaces between sentences. It makes you look like a
dinosaur. . Yes, I will get a lot of angry letters for that last remark. But
you really should thank me. Or your secretary should thank me. For those
subjected to working with people who continue to hit that space bar twice,
memorize these instructions for find and replace in Microsoft Word. For Mac
users, hit Shift-Apple-H. For PC users, hit Ctrl-H. Hit the space bar twice
in the first field. Hit it once in the "Replace With" field. Then click
"Replace All. (Even though I know these shortcuts, for some reason I
continue to go line by line fixing this mess.) Now, I wasn't always wise to
this. Thankfully, journalism school beat it into me at a very early age. The
bible for journalistic style, "The Associated Press Stylebook," says: "Use a
single space after the period at the end of a sentence. Curiously, the
oldest stylebook I have, the 1995 edition, does not contain such direct
instructions. The most detailed explanation I could find as to why we all,
at one time or another, have done this wrong comes from Slate. It starts
with the typewriter, which has some deficiencies that are less obvious than
the fact that it single-handedly gave rise to the white-out industry.
Typewriters create monospaced type, meaning that every letter, number or
character is given an equal space on the page. "Monospaced type gives you
text that looks 'loose' and uneven; there's a lot of white space between
characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between
sentences immediately," Farhad Manjoo wrote in Slate. "Hence the adoption of
the two-space rule -- on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes
text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in
the 1970s. Now almost all fonts on our computers are proportional, meaning
an "I" gets much less space than an "M. There's a lot less white space
between characters and words, making it very easy for readers to spot the
single space at the end of a sentence. And when there are two spaces there
instead? Well, your copy looks like it has holes wide enough for a bus to
drive through. Doesn't it? See. I'm right. ---------- mmharris at tribpub.com
<mailto:mmharris at tribpub.com>  Twitter @chiconfidential 

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