Did you know this? All my typing life, all my writing term paper life, all my writing of any kind life, it was the rule that you always move two spaces after a period. We were taught this in typing class and the rule carried over to English teachers grading our papers.
Well. Not anymore. Seems this two space separation between sentences was a function of manual typewriters and their type space mechanics. If you're still doing the two space foxtrot when typing you are quite the grammatical oaf and there are many many of us oafs out there who had no clue we were downsizing our sentence spacing. Did you notice I automatically used two spaces between sentences in this post, looking back at it I see it will be hard to let this go.
Typing class turned out to be one of the more valuable classes I took in high school and it pains me to learn that one of the commandments, which I have never abandoned, is now verboten.
So I have gone from the two spaces to a nicely formed run-on sentence.
Thanks for the heads up! I've been doing it wrong all these years. I hope no one was paying attention when I did it!
Posted by: Mary | January 18, 2012 at 02:29 PM