I did not know this until the fall when I was convinced the TV had it wrong and I looked it up.
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I just learned that it's no longer correct to type two spaces after a period ending a sentence! Showing my age - I still do and it's a habit I'll probably never break.
I also learned how to make codling moth traps this weekend and that lemon scented ammonia still smells nothing like lemons. :p
Spell checkers will fix it for you. I had to learn to stop that since I do a lot of transcribing.
That custom ended with "proportional spacing" - before PCs even. It goes back to typewriters with fixed width fonts.
To confuse things even more, if you have a Blackberry, and you put two spaces after a sentence in an email, it automatically adds the period and capitalizes the next letter. So, even if I WANTED to change to the one space after a period, I couldn't do it on my BB (unless I wanted to give up this feature).
Karen
I too like how two spaces look after a period. But I do most of my writing online, and most blogs/forums, etc now eliminate the extra space anyway, so I'm wasting effort.
I'm not liking it, but since I've started my dulcimer blog, in the name of efficiency I'm retraining myself slowly lately. :(
as for the period space space
I have learned that I can hit "ctrl a" to highlight an entire paper, then do a find and replace all
find period space space
replace with period space
HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Guess I showed them!
I'm guessing that if you're using Courier or another "retro" fixed width font, you should still insert two spaces after a period. The purpose of doing that was to create enough space for the reader to see the end of the sentence.
I was forty years old before I learned to spell scissors with "s" instead of "z"--scizzors.
I had always learned the colors of the light spectrum as Roy G Biv (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet). I learned today that there are other ways to keep it straight.
You know what makes me laugh is how something you learned that you found trivial sticks with you. When I was in college I took editing and writing from this professor with a reputation of being a pain in the butt however I really loved the old man (he was in his 80's in 2001-2003 when I had him). His sense of humor just made sense, I loved his lectures and the work wasn't bad. I ended up taking editing, one writing and one history of Journalism class with him.
So a couple things from Dr. Starr really stuck like what a Serif and Sans Serif font is, how palatino is a visually appealing font to him (which I now use for work by choice :p) and how you should use the exclamation point unless you want the sentence to be read as a scream. I can't help using the exclamation but I always blush and remember him reading someone's work yelling every sentence they used an exclamation on. He would be ashamed at my lack of proper punctuation and laziness on proof reading for this board. :o
It's only been within the last 10 years that I learned that "miniscule" and "minuscule" are both proper spellings. I'd thought it was only the latter.
And I've always liked Palatino, too. It was my font of choice when I was self-employed.