I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m outraged! Outraged, I tell you. Is nothing sacred?<\/p>\n
I got a set of documents back from an editor the other day, which in itself is usually enough to twist my knickers. (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not so fond of being edited. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind it when they catch actual mistakes, but I tend to bristle over suggestions of a stylistic nature. I suppose I should work on that should I ever want to actually get anything professionally published.)<\/p>\n
Aside from the usual complaints about formatting and a couple of typos, I came across a note saying that I had too many spaces after each period and that the new standard is only one space after a full stop or other final punctuation mark.<\/p>\n
What?!? <\/p>\n
Only one space after a period? Bah! One space after a comma or semi-colon, two spaces after a period, exclamation point, question mark or colon. If nothing else, I know that rule is sacred. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the Bible, I think. It was certainly drilled into my head over an old Underwood manual typewriter in Grade 9 typing class.<\/p>\n
So I hopped on the trusty Interwebs to gather evidence to support my cause\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and to my great dismay, found out my editor was (gasp!) correct. I googled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchow many spaces after a period<\/a>‘ and found at least four pages of entries discussing the subject. How could I have possibly missed this debate before now? <\/p>\n Apparently, now that we have proportional fonts – thanks to online word processing – the old practice of indicating the end of a phrase with a double space is now rendered unnecessarily redundant. Even my most trustworthy Canadian Press Style Guide<\/em><\/a> advocates only one space after a period. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a whole new world. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never felt more obsolete.<\/p>\n I politely told the editor that after 25 years (ack!) of ten-fingered typing, it would take a lot more than a simple rule change to disabuse me of the satisfying double-thumb-thwack on the space bar at the end of a sentence, and that if she valued consistency, she would accept my two-spaced full stops. She took a long look at me, perhaps evaluating the extra white showing around the irises of my eyes and the little vein throbbing under my ear, and nodded silently.<\/p>\n There are some things that are simply sacred. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m learning to deal with prepositions at the end of a sentence or split infinitives. I can live with or without a serial comma<\/a>. But this is my line in the sand: I will never relent to a single space at the end of a sentence. Never!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m outraged! Outraged, I tell you. Is nothing sacred? I got a set of documents back from an editor the other day, which in itself is usually enough to twist my knickers. (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not so fond of being edited. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind it when they catch actual mistakes, but I tend to bristle over suggestions … Continue reading “I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m outraged!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-the-universe-and-everything","category-wordplay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}