Assange, Emails, Periods and Spaces
13 January 2011 | Writing
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Marvellous article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate about why you should never, ever, use two periods after a space. Many do this, and they’re the one’s who think of a computer as a typewriter on steroids. It’s not, of course. Proportional fonts don’t need two periods, it’s as simple as that.
And it looks really, really ugly.
You also don’t need underlining. Manual typewriters couldn’t do boldface and italics. They couldn’t resize or change fonts. A computer lets you do all that and more, and your average word processing program is pretty close to a true desktop publishing environment, at least to the extent it allows for far more complex formatting than was ever possible before.
Robin Williams’s book, The PC Is Not A Typewriter also lays out some excellent rules for working with documents on computers. It’s a very handy reference or guide. For years, I tried to explain these fundamentals to a friend — he passed away a few weeks ago — but would he listen? He insisted on sending out stuff (even on email) with underlining, two spaces after periods and more. Given how much he wrote I suspect that one of the reasons people stopped reading his stuff carefully or attentively was because of the horrendous formatting.
