Microsoft has put its typographical foot down:
Two spaces between sentences is too many.
For the first time, Microsoft Word will mark two spaces after a punctuation mark as an error, underlining the extra space with its authoritative blue, squiggly line.
To this I say:
It’s about damn time. Only typographical savages are still placing two spaces between sentences.
I remember a time when placing two spaces after a sentence was considered appropriate. This was a relic of the days of typewriters, when two spaces were used because characters were monospaced, meaning they took up the same amount of space on the page. Thanks to computers, most fonts adjust the width of characters so sentences are easier to read, so two spaces after a period are no longer needed.
I also remember making the switch from two spaces to one, sometime in the mid to late 1990’s. As an early adopter of computers and the internet (and bulletin board systems before that), I was already writing on a computer in 1990, so I almost never used a typewriter, but the convention of two spaces after a period still lingered for a while, even in the digital realm.
But by the time I finally made it to college in 1994, the double space between sentences was becoming a dinosaur, so I finally made the change.
It took some time to break the habit, but I eventually did, and this was good. Handing in a manuscript to my publisher or a column to one of my newspaper editors with a double space after every sentence would not have been good.
Also, I’m not a savage.
So if you place a single space between sentences, congratulations. You’ve been doing the right and just thing for a long time, and the world has finally caught up to you. Feel good about yourself. Smug, even. Superior.
You are a champion of typography.
If you’re still placing two spaces between sentences, you have no time nor any reason to feel smug or superior. You have a terrible habit in need of breaking.
Time to get to work, savage.
