I came across this really good
blog post about double spacing after a period, or question mark and quotation mark by Jennifer Gonzalez. Her blog is
Cult of Pedagogy.
It was the headline
Nothing Says Over 40 Like Two Spaces after a Period! that got me. Pretty clever, eh?
When wearing my editor's hat, the two spaces at the end of a sentence create extra work. I'm the one who gets to go and delete the extra spaces. It's a tedious chore. (If anyone knows of a command on Word to do the deleting, please share.) So, I was really glad someone was spreading the gospel about needing only one space.
The post is well written and very interesting, if you find things like typesetting and printing interesting, which I do. I was surprised that Jennifer left out "
the rivers of white" reason. That is when the double spaces coincidentally line up to create a column, or river, of white space.
Here's another interesting thing: Jennifer's blog post received enough criticism and negative attention she felt compelled to write
another post to apologize. Seems the post was taken as ageist and unkind.
I didn't take it that way at all. But after reading her
apology post, I can see how some people took umbrage.
Still, I hope the offended will subscribe to the one-space-after-a-period rule.
