In Slate, Farhad Manjoo takes up the contentious question of whether to leave one or two spaces after a full stop.
Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).
Andrew Sullivan collects a few links on the topic, but he overlooked PB.com. We thoroughly hashed out this issue back in 2004 in connection with Rathergate:
How many spaces after a full stop?
Personally, I come down on the one space side of the debate. To be sure, I used to fall in the two space camp, but I retrained myself a decade ago or so to conform with the stylistic preferences of my case book coauthors. Not too difficult, especially with global search and replace to catch any slip ups. So it comes as a surprise that the otherwise estimable Megan McArdle brushes the issue aside with the dismissive comment that "it's not worth the effort to retrain myself." Nonsense. It just takes a bit of will power. Much easier than, say, quitting smoking (about which more in the next post).
