When I first began typing, I used to put three spaces after a sentence. Somewhere along the way, I whittled it down to two. Apparently now, it's accepted that you should use a single space after a sentence.
Looking into it, the double space originated during the typewriter era where they used monospaced fonts (all the characters are the same width). It made it easier to distinguish where the sentences were. I think this applies mostly with question marks and exclamation points. Periods tend to have a lot of associated white space anyways, so I don't see the problem there. Apparently, double spaces were also used after colons or semicolons as well.
Anyways, as times progressed and variable width fonts came to prominence, the double space was reduced to a single space. I'm not sure if it improves readability or not, but for those old school folk, it reduces the number of bytes that the document takes up. Besides, web browsers don't render two spaces, from what I've been told. However, there could be potential confusion when a sentence ends in an abbreviation or acronym and the following sentence begins with a proper noun.
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2 comments:
saturday, 2 june, 2007 17:10 MAT
this can be tragic for the student that needs a minimum amount of pages in their assignment and lack of spaces throughout causes it to be shorter than required.
brett once found a youtube clip illustrating how to make assignments longer by simply increasing the size of the font used for the period whenever used. i'll have to see if i can find it.
i still use two, i think by habit. if it renders otherwise, then so be it. i try my best to rearrange sentences so that they do not end in abbreviations or urls or anything that might not be so condusive to having a period following it.
,` )
saturday, 2 june, 2007 17:50 MAT
paper length trick
but if the paper sucks in the first place, it doesn't necessarily ensure a better grade.
,` )
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