Two spaces after a period...Why it's wrong.

Not Mrs. Lockey...Lackey...whatever.

I don't remember my 6th grade typing teacher's name...Mrs. Lockey? Mrs. Lackey? But I do remember that she had big, blonde, overly-permed hair, she always wore bright lipstick, something about her teeth and her beady eyes gave her a kind of rat-like face, and that I was amazed that she could type 75 words per minute with ridiculously long, brightly painted nails.

I didn't learn much in that typing class - my ability to type crazy fast came from chatting to friends on MSN Messenger. But, that class did teach me to keep my fingers on the home-row (asdf jkl;) and to double-space after a period. Now, 14 years later, I've learned that my beloved double-space is completely wrong. In fact, even as I type this, my thumb automatically strikes the spacebar twice and I have to go back and correct it.

When typesetting first began, it was filled with inconsistencies in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But as typesetting became more widespread, typographers began to agree on certain conventions regarding the style and look of the typed word. One of these agreements was that each sentence should be followed by one space, not two. By the end of the 19th century, the one space rule was set in stone (or in type, as the case may be). So why then, are so many people (myself included) double-spacing more than 100 years after it was agreed not to?

Because of the manual typewriter.

It's YOUR fault, manual typewriter!

 

To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. The problem with typewriters was that they used mono-spaced type - that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like i or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks loose and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule - on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read.

I've never written on a manual typewriter, and I'd venture a guess that anyone my age or younger hasn't either. So why are we still being taught the double-space rule? Easy - because our teachers learned the double-space rule, because their teachers learned to type on manual typewriters. Essentially, it all comes down to improper instruction, and laziness. Is the single-space rule arbitrary? Yep. The same way that we type shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence instead of  %. Double-spacing at the end of a sentence is just as incorrect as if I were to end this sentence like this@#  Therefore, abandon your double-spacing, all you double-spacers!