If you type two spaces after a full stop, you’re wrong!
Image: George Hodan (cc)
Despite its prevalence, a double space at the end of a sentence is simply incorrect.
As with so many ‘truths’ it is not until we question their veracity that we can confidently change our ways. Nits do not prefer clean hair and they do not ‘jump’ from head to head because they don’t have knees. Fact. Typing two spaces at the end of a sentence is inarguably wrong. Fact.
In Farhad Manjoo’s blog in Slate he reveals the etymology of the double space lies in the inconsistencies of the early printing presses where style guides were not yet de rigueur. Once rules were established a single space was agreed upon and is now prescribed by every major style manual. So why is a double space still so common?
One of the reasons is my Nit Theory: the more a myth is perpetuated and reinforced, the more likely we are to send our children to school with dirty hair believing it will protect them from hordes of jumping lice. One of the other culprits is typewriters. Typewriters used monospaced type, where every character occupies an equal amount of space regardless of its size – an ‘I’ takes up the same amount of space as a ‘W’.
As Manjoo explains this made it difficult to spot the spaces between sentences and hence the adoption of the two-space rule on a typewriter. However, monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s, along with the two-space rule and the practice of not wearing seat belts.
So now you can debunk two enduring myths: two spaces at the end of a sentence is wrong and nits don’t have knees.
