Space Mystery Solved!

 Not that kind of space. (But a sensational title, right?)

No, I'm talking about the space after the period (or ? or !) at the end of a sentence-- one space or two? 

I typed my way through endless college papers, my own and my husband's, as well as my MA thesis and I always put two spaces after the period. Just like I learned at my mother's knee (actually, just like I learned in typing class -- back in the Fifties.

So, imagine my surprise when my first manuscript came back to me with enigmatic little red marks all over it, indicating that I was taking up too much space -- that one space after the . or ? or ! was all that I was allowed.

Well, okay, then. I shook my head and tried to unlearn the two space habit of a lifetime, muttering to myself about the inscrutable ways of publishers but never asking why? 

Now the mystery is solved! I stumbled upon this article in SLATE (which I visit everyday to read DOONESBURY) and learned that it all has to do with the difference between typewriters (remember them?) and computers.

The article says  that typographers have always agreed that one space between sentences is preferable for ease of reading. But (and I quote --) 

" The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced 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. 

Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it."

I think maybe you have to be a typographer to get real worked up over this. But I really liked learning the reason for the new rule.  Plus it's a funny, funny article.