Breaking the Habit

I have been trying my damnedest to avoid putting two spaces after a period since I read a very well-written rant article about it. I learned how to type on an actual typewriter, and one thing that was drilled into me very early is that you always, always, always put two spaces after a full stop, and I have been applying this rule inflexibly in my writing every since.

However, it turns out that the tyography industry changed in the meantime, and that modern methods of typing are more sophisticated than my clunky old electric typewriter, meaning that the two spaces are no longer necessary for readers to understand that a full stop has just taken place. I had never heard from anybody that the two-space thing was now old-fashioned and out of vogue and practiced only by moldy-olders who refused to change with the times. I just thought that it was the way things were.

So, pardon me my ignorance and adherence to this old-timey typographical rule for the last several thousand pages of blogging I’ve perpetrated here and in other forums throughout the years. I just learned that I was doing it wrong all this time, and now I have to retrain my fingers to get it right and not appear for the whole world to be some sort of Victorian time-traveler.

Bear with me: I will screw up now and again, but I am committed to providing you, my dear followers, with only the most up-to-date typography. I would hate to waste your valuable time by forcing your eyes to traverse all of those vast wastelands of empty space.