Miscellaneous

Sometimes I?m surprised at how tightly some otherwise clear-thinking people cling to what they learned in high-school typing class. When I took typing in high school, 37 years ago, I was taught to hit the space bar twice after each sentence. That was a good lesson back then, because I was typing on an Underwood manual typewriter, a machine incapable of producing anything in a proportionately spaced font.

Today, if you?re reading this blog post, then you probably write on a computer, not an Underwood typewriter. And unless you?re perverse enough to have set the default font in your word-processing software to Courier, everything you write on your computer is written in a proportionately spaced font. This fact makes the two-spaces rule obsolete. Once space after each sentence is enough.

Recently John McIntyre wrote about this; the flak he caught prompted him to write two follow-up posts (here and here). Me, I?m left wondering why anyone who cares deeply about getting their writing right would be so unwilling to re-examine what they learned in high school.

My prior blog posts on this should-be-uncontroversial topic are here, here, here, and here.

(Photo credit.)