If you're 25 and you grew up in a small town, I can nearly guarantee that your "typing instructor" has given you a terrible habit, because I've read four times this week that single spaces after sentences are now the norm (and probably have been forever. Of course, I was so shocked that I immediately set about putting twenty minutes into it. So, a long, long time ago, people once used these ancient devises that weighed more than solid iron to type papers and all sorts of forms, they were called typewriters.
As great as they were (not)--they did have a few problems. The problem that affects this long held typing myth is that each letter from a typewriter had the same width, and so did the spaces. This had two effects. First, if you were typing a page worth of solid text, (did I mention typewriters don't do images) typewriters had a nasty habit of lining up spaces on the page, which would then gang up on your page and create what were called "rivers" of spaces. Secondly, (and I have no clue about this because like every good student, I typed two spaces) it was very difficult for readers to separate sentences unless the typist used two spaces after every period.
Long story short, computers today do not have that problem because they can generate characters differently depending on their context, settings, etc. Rest assured that a single space will be sufficient in almost any computerized situation. If your actually looking at the text side-by-side, it almost looks like the double-spaces are
gapped teeth.
If you're 25 and you grew up in a small town, I can nearly guarantee that your "typing instructor" has given you a terrible habit, because I've read four times this week that single spaces after sentences are now the norm (and probably have been forever. Of course, I was so shocked that I immediately set about putting twenty minutes into it. So, a long, long time ago, people once used these ancient devises that weighed more than solid iron to type papers and all sorts of forms, they were called typewriters.
As great as they were (not)--they did have a few problems. The problem that affects this long held typing myth is that each letter from a typewriter had the same width, and so did the spaces. This had two effects. First, if you were typing a page worth of solid text, (did I mention typewriters don't do images) typewriters had a nasty habit of lining up spaces on the page, which would then gang up on your page and create what were called "rivers" of spaces. Secondly, (and I have no clue about this because like every good student, I typed two spaces) it was very difficult for readers to separate sentences unless the typist used two spaces after every period.
Long story short, computers today do not have that problem because they can generate characters differently depending on their context, settings, etc. Rest assured that a single space will be sufficient in almost any computerized situation. If your actually looking at the text side-by-side, it almost looks like the double-spaces are gapped teeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment