"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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If your father is an editor, and assuming he was an editor before we had
desktop computers, ask him this: When you're writing for publication, is
it correct to place *two* spaces after terminal punctuation in a
sentence? Under what circumstances, and why?

Any real editor can answer this.

--
Ed Huntress (an editor since 1974)

The instructor for the Governmentese writing class I took at MITRE
suggested two spaces between sentences. In practice anyone who had aquired
"Ph.D" after their name could write any way they wanted.

jsw

Yeah. And then people like me get stuck with editing their stuff into
something that actually can be read. d8-)

I'd much rather write, but in the medical field, I mostly edit.

Since it's unlikely anyone else will comment on the two spaces, it was
standard practice when typewriters produced monospaced type (with a couple
of exceptions), and the variation in visual space between letters (glyphs)
made it difficult to tell whether there was a space after a period -- and
periods themselves are hard to see when the type is all wobbly from
monospacing. So, probably for 100 years, writers enterred two spaces after
periods, exclamation points, and question marks, to make it easy on the
typesetters. It also carried over to everyday typewriting, with the
double-space being a stylistic option.

This continued for years afterward, even after it made work more *difficult*
for typesetters, because they had to extract the extra spaces in an
electronic file, before committing the writing to type. It was common
through the mid-'90s. In medical editing, I saw it as recently as four or
five years ago, mostly from older writers who just couldn't break the habit.

As for editing the professional writing of Ph.Ds, I demand combat pay for
that, especially when I have to argue with them.

--
Ed Huntress