I admit it. I’m a double spacer. When I type that period (or question mark or exclamation point) at the end of a sentence, I hit that space bar twice as a prelude to the next sentence. I’ve done it for decades and I’ll probably keep doing it for decades. It feels so natural. A period by itself just isn’t enough to signal the end of a thought. Who could dispute that?
Not convinced of my correctness? Consider Microsoft Word. It doesn’t complain when I put two spaces together at the end of a sentence, even though it notifies me whenever I do it anywhere else. How can it be wrong if Word doesn’t complain? (Note: A little fact checking reveals that Word does have an option to flag it as an error, but it’s not the default setting, so I rest my case and declare victory.
Astute readers will already have noticed there is only one space between the sentences in this post. If you use Blogger as your platform, you already know the reason why. No matter how many spaces you place between your sentences when you submit a post, Blogger removes all but one. When I first discovered this a few years ago while working on my first blog, I spent over an hour trying to trick Blogger into accepting more than one space. My soul crushed by this failure, I resigned myself to this fact of life and it no longer bothers me (very much). If our overlords in the cloud think this is the way it should be, who am I to argue?
If you care about this topic at all, here are links to two dissenting points of view:
Against double spacing
For double spacing
Website of Ken Rahmoeller -- fantasy author, chemist, and lover of all things Hogwarts (Photo Courtesy of Scarluuk)
Interesting, I like the two spaces also though I have heard a few typesetters complain about it.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Blogger goes, I do not think it is Blogger that is stripping the space, but rather the way browsers read HTML. If you ever do decide you want to add some extra spaces to a post, you can click on the "edit html" tab of the post screen and enter " " everyplace you want a space (without the quotes). At least that used to work for me.