Writing, Editing, Spacing

An entire generation or two have grown up without touching a typewriter, learning to "keyboard" instead of type. Those who learned on typewriters were taught to hit the space bar twice between sentences. This was because Courier--the typeface used in most typewriters--is mono-spaced (all the letters are the same width). A single space with a mono-spaced font is too hard to read. Most typefaces in MS Word and other most popular word processing programs use proportional spacing. Every letter, including the space, has a different width. Proportional fonts need only one space between sentences to look right. How does this one look? It is "Georgia", 12 point.

And this is Courier. Looks weird, huh?

Do agents, editors, and publishers care? Usually not, because the spacing between sentences is a matter for the printers to handle. More recently, printers typesetting with proportional fonts have generally *not* made the inter-sentence space any greater than the inter-word space. Some people think this makes text more difficult to read. Others don't care. No matter how many times I hit the space bar now (in Blogger), the sentences are displayed with only one space in between. (Yes, I learned typing in high school, back in the dark ages of the 1950s.)

When I proofread or edit someone else's work, I ask or estimate which style they want used, then set the MS Word checker accordingly and let it change the "mistakes". I've never seen an ms with a consistent spacing practiced. I can't type without hitting the space bar twice, so I'm grateful for the automatic adjustments the software makes.

To space twice is nice, and once is fine, too. It's really a non-issue these days, one of the many trivialities beginners worry about along with plagiarism, copyrights, and how to pronounce "SASE".