A double space after a period is in my muscle memory too. FYI, for those of you who edit (or more) your kids’ college essays, a double space is a definite ‘tell’ that an adult was involved.
One space or two? Heck, I’d be thrilled if my kids would use capital letters and periods when they’re supposed to. I can’t worry about trivialities like post period spacing.
I’m reminded of a bit on a Sesame Street-type program when I was growing up showing the impact of punctuation. A sign which says:
BEACH CLOSED
NO SWIMMING ALLOWED
reads something entirely different when punctuation is applied:
BEACH CLOSED?
NO! SWIMMING ALLOWED.
I always found the sign SLOW CHILDREN funny. One logical interpretation would be that the children on the street move like sloths.
I find it hard to believe you can extrapolate that easily from a fixed font to a variable font.
I’ve been working with web content management systems for many years now, and I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t strip out the second space, except for way back on IBM’s old CMS. They allowed two spaces, with the odd side effect of allowing lines to break between spaces, meaning sometimes the next line started with a space before the first word that did not belong and was disruptive when reading.
Team Oxford Comma all the way! (Big fan of Eats Shoots and Leaves).
HMTL always strips out the second space. The only way around that is to hard code a nonbreaking space -
- into the text. Some WYSIWYG editors are adding that extra hard code in when you type in your entry… but bottom line, the HTML code itself will never render more than one space without the extra space being coded.
And yes, the whole point of the elimination of the second space is because of proportional spacing with modern fonts - so a study based on eye tracking of a fixed with font would indeed be meaningless.
I thought this was a good explanation of why you shouldn’t use two spaces after a period.
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/
Yes to the Oxford comma.
@Bromfield2 : I am over 40 (by 25 years) and I will use two spaces until the day I die (and so will everyone on my staff) because one space is just … not right. I do not care what font anyone uses. I can see the difference, and my reaction is visceral. Feel free to change when I and the other dinosaurs are gone, but my work (and every opinion that my court issues) will have two spaces after periods, question marks, exclamation points, and colons. :D/
With all due respect, it does give a reason why a single space is acceptable, but it does not convince me that it looks better. In fact, the APA Style Manual agrees:
I have my Millenials trained to be on the 2-space bandwagon. The only time one of then goes to the dark side is in online academic work where, as someone noted above, every character counts.
^^^^The Chicago Manual of Style has a different view on two spaces after a period.
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/OneSpaceorTwo.html
The MLA Style Guide for Writers of Research Papers says one space (unless the instructor says otherwise).
https://style.mla.org/number-of-spaces-after-period/
My favorite t-shirt:
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
Commas save lives!
You reminded me of Odgen Nash’s poem about street signs, “I’ll Take the High Road Commission”, which ends with these words:
Wisest of their proverbs,
Truest of their talk,
Have I found that dictum:
CROSS
C H I L D R E N
WALK
When Adam took the highway
He left his sons a guide:
CROSS
C H I L D R E N
WALK
CHEERFUL
C H I L D R E N
RIDE
(link for the whole poem: http://badgermum.blogspot.com/2013/08/ill-take-high-road-commission.html)
There’s also the textbook:
Eats, shoots and leaves
Eats, shoots, and leaves
Eats shoots and leaves
It took me years to get used to the single space between sentences and just as long to adopt the Oxford comma. But this old dog is done with learning new tricks. I have a feeling the use of the possessive case before a gerund is on the chopping block, but I’ll give it up only when they pry it from my cold, dead typing fingers.