Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash
In the five or so years I spent as the white-paper editor for Ericsson, some writers would file their copy with two spaces after every period (or full stop if you prefer to call it that). During the noughties, I noticed a revival of the practice. One repeat offender confessed to ‘thinking it was cool and retro’. I think he was swayed by some romantic notion of novel writing on a rickety old typewriter with a view of crashing waves, instead of the reality — rows of white desks and brick-exposed industrial walls.
I learned to type on a typewriter in the early eighties during my final years of high school. Unlike kids who went to school in the US, learning to touch-type wasn’t part of the Irish curriculum. So, I taught myself (no comment). We were fortunate enough to have a typewriter at home and my big sister was a bit of a whizz, so I got some lessons from her before she got bored with me. That iconic clickety-clackety of the keys, the ding of the margin bell, and the smell of ink from the ribbon bar are all things I can get nostalgic about.
Manual typewriters use monospaced fonts — each character takes up the same width on the page — and it was best practice to type two spaces after a period. The idea was to help readers understand they had reached the start of a new sentence, to take a slightly longer breath. This practice was largely dropped when word processors and computer screens became capable of visualizing variable-width fonts. The gap seemed unnecessarily wide and no longer useful. One post I read said, ‘you could get a boat through it’.
Having to wade through someone’s copy and remove all the darn extra spaces (even if you can automate it) is a highly annoying waste of time for an editor. Don’t be swayed by romantic notions, mind the gap and please use a single space after a period.
dpdoyle 
Interesting Dee. I learned to type as an undergraduate. Took the unusually, for me, prescient decision that I was going to be on a keyboard for a lot of my working life so enrolled in the ‘Irish Independent, Sight & Sound’ training centre. I was in with a group of very Dublin girls, mostly teenagers and all wiser, if not older, than me. When I see mature software academics picking at the keys with two fingers I feel a certain satisfaction that, at least in this, I was smarter than them.
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