Two Space or Not Two Space?
I haven’t always been a one-spacer.
Mrs. James, queen of the computer lab, taught me how to type on the beautifully ergonomic QWERTY keyboard when I was in fifth grade. One by one, I learned where each letter was, and which finger was responsible for it. I was excited to discard the hunt-and-peck and quickly talk to friends via the ground-breaking technology, AOL Instant Messenger.
Mrs. James didn’t really say why, but she taught us to put two spaces after every period. It was the rule, just like you capitalize the first letter of a sentence or a proper noun. Soon, my thumbs learned to double-tap the space bar at the end of every sentence without protest.
Until about ten years later, when I sat in a second-round interview for a job as a student writer. I’d submitted a writing sample to the director of communications at my university, confident in my writing and punctuation skills.
“One space after the period,” he said, with a quintessential newsroom editor aura.
“Oh,” I said. “Really? Not two?”
“No. One. Changed about ten years ago.”
Ironically, with no disrespect to Mrs. James, that was about the time I was learning to type.
But I could tell from his face that this was not up for debate. It didn’t fall in authorial discretion or artistic license. It was the standard, and he wasn’t going to budge.
It had to do with typewriters and fonts, he said, and that’s just how it is now.
Eager to please my new boss-and adhere to the industry in which I longed to excel-I beat my thumbs into one-space submission. Though it wasn’t easy to undo ten years of muscle memory, soon I could spot an extra space from a mile away, and my thumbs left behind the double-tap.
I didn’t think much more of it after that. Until it popped up in 2018 via a new (though deeply flawed) study out of Skidmore College which seemed to land in favor of the two-spacers -as if we needed anything more to argue about.
I read about it in a variety of articles from the Washington Post to Forbes to The Atlantic, and I asked my favorite editors about it. I found that the two-space habit hearkened back to the typewriter days (though the Chicago Manual of Style recently suggested it might go back even farther). The early word processors used monospaced fonts, where letters like i and l occupied the same amount of space as the m or w, even if it didn’t really need it. The two spaces would visually signal the reader that a new sentence was beginning, since the monospaced fonts made this difficult. But as technology developed, proportional fonts were built so that is and m s would only take up what room they individually, proportionately needed. So the extra space between sentences became obsolete.
Many thumbs, however, became obstinate.
My thumbs had only been double-tapping for ten years when I had to make the change, but I know many whose muscles have been doing the two-tap for decades. It is no easy task to request a set of muscles to alter a nearly lifelong trade. But sometimes learning and improving means adapting, and yes, changing.
Don’t Stop Learning
The internet reports the convention made its debut in 1989, but the Chicago Manual of Style didn’t adopt the rule change officially until 2003. That puts us almost twenty years past the official rule change, yet the debate rages on, with as much heat as the Oxford Comma divide, pop vs. soda, or even cats vs. dogs. (Yes, pop, and dogs, respectively.)
But why all this nonsense about spaces and periods? Shouldn’t it be quality of content that we focus on? Sure, content is king. But punctuation and formatting and grammar and rules matter because they’re what make content readable and digestible. If your content is great, but your formatting is distracting, you’ll lose credibility with your reader and they might abandon your content altogether. And maybe they’ll still do that-but make sure it’s for the right reasons, and not avoidable ones like spelling and spacing.
The irony of all of this is that just as quickly as the rule changed that fateful day in 2003, it could just as easily and quickly change back someday. (Preferably when I’m long gone.) But if it’s not this rule that changes, it will be another one. May I have the teachability and adaptability when that day comes. Because it is coming.
Until then, long live the one space.
by Emily Gehman; connect with Emily at emilygehman.com.
Originally published via Mary Cooney, PhD., at https://www.linkedin.com.
