{"id":642,"date":"2014-05-19T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T04:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benschersten.com\/blog\/?p=642"},"modified":"2014-05-19T09:38:32","modified_gmt":"2014-05-19T13:38:32","slug":"one-space-or-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benschersten.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/one-space-or-two\/","title":{"rendered":"One Space or Two?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"origin_2593463316\"In high school, when I learned to type, I was told\u00a0that a period (or any punctuation) at the end of a sentence MUST be followed by exactly two spaces<\/em>. Ten years later when I was writing curriculum units\u00a0for publication I was told that a period (or any punctuation) at the end of a sentence MUST be followed by exactly one space<\/em>. What happened?<\/p>\n

The Abreviated Story:<\/h1>\n

First there were books…<\/h2>\n

Variable space typing has been part of printing for, well, basically forever. This meant that not all letters were the same width. A lower-case i<\/em> didn’t take up as much space as a lower-case m<\/em>, and making spaces of different sizes was easy. And at the end of a sentence a slightly longer space (though not as big as two spaces) was generally used.<\/p>\n

Then came the typewriter…<\/h2>\n

\"origin_12149305295\"<\/a>When most of us learned to type (or when our teachers learned to type) we learned on typewriters. Typerwriters are great, but they have an important limitation: every character has exactly the same width. Sentences look like this. \u00a0The i and the m were the same width.<\/code>\u00a0To add some extra clarity to the end of sentence, an extra space was added; so we all used two spaces.<\/p>\n

Then came computers…<\/h2>\n

Then with affordable\u00a0computers, the average person at home had access to variable space typing, letters and\u00a0spaces of different widths; the computer took care of this automatically. Since then, the push for two spaces has been less common; many have gone back to one space. What do the style guides say now?<\/p>\n