CONCLUSION

Well, you want to take my conclusion on this earth shattering, emotionally charged, vehemently debated, and seemingly unimportant issue. Here is my conclusion (I will defend it afterwards so read on) use 1, one, uno, single space, the whole between zero and two, and never more than one space after a period. For that matter use only one space after any and all punctuation be it a period, comma, semi-colon, colon, question mark, or exclamation mark.

I know that it is tough for you old timers to get use to only banging once on that space bar but you really do need to get used to it. I resisted my colleagues on this very topic for five years (whoa can you say I'm stubborn). My colleagues are high school Business Education teachers. After changing my ways and retraining myself and now teaching it correctly to the fine young adults that sign up for my beginning keyboarding class I feel much better about sending them out into the world of work and higher education.

Would you like for me to back up my conclusion? I will give you the short version of the story this is also the non-conspiracy theory version of the story. The following is an excerpt from Robin Williams book The Mac Is Not A Typewriter published by Peachpit Press, Inc. I wish she would have named her book "Your Computer Is Not A Typewriter" so people would not think this is one of those Mac/PC issues. It is not. She did write another book The PC Is Not A Typewriter which I have not read but would sprout wings and fly if it did not say something extremely similar. Now for the excerpt...

"On a typewriter, all the characters are monospaced; that is, they each take up the same amount of space-the letter i takes up as much space as the letter m. Because they are monospaced, you need to type two spaces after periods to separate one sentence from the next, But...

On a Macintosh (unless you're using the fonts Monaco or Courier, which are monospaced just like a typewriter and what would you want to use those for anyway) the characters are proportional; that is, they each take up a proportional amount of space-the letter i takes up about one-fifth the space of the letter m. So you no longer need extra spaces to separate the sentences. Take a careful look at these two examples:

 monospaced    proportional
Notice in this paragraph how the letters line up in columns, one under the other, just as on your typewriter. This monospacing is what makes it necessary to use two spaces to separate sentences. This paragraph, however, uses a font with proportional spacing. Each character takes up a proportional amount of the space available. Thus the single space between sentences is enough to visually separate them, and two spaces creates a disturbing gap.

Of course, this one-space rule applies just as well to the spacing after colons, semi-colons, question marks, quotation marks, exclamation points, or any other punctuation you can think of. Yes, this is a difficult habit to break, but it must be done.

Take a look at any magazine or book on your shelf-you will never find two spaces between sentences (the only exception will be publications or advertisements produced on the Mac by someone who was still following typewriter rules)."

I have not based my conclusion on this one source, but Robin Williams said it so well that I had to share it with you. There are countless other sources which would corroborate this same conclusion.