Is your writing showing its age…and yours?
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Take a moment and draw a lower-case letter I on a piece of paper. Now draw a lower-case W next to it. Did you notice something? The W is several times wider than the I—probably four times wider.
The first typewriters began to appear in offices in the 1870s. They were mechanically complex machines, and one of the biggest engineering challenges involved the mechanism that moved to the next space when a character was typed. What made that a challenge was the conclusion behind the little experiment I just put you through: letters have different widths.
Back then, there wasn’t a practical way to vary the machinery’s spacing to match each letter. That’s why the typewriter’s inventors decided to make all the letters and the spaces between them the exact same width. Some typewriters were designed to fit ten characters into an inch, while others packed 12 in there. In other words, depending on the typewriter, every character and even space was exactly one-tenth or one-twelfth of an inch wide.
That created a quandary for people reading typewritten copy. If the spaces were all the same, how could their eyes quickly differentiate between the end of a word and the end of a sentence? Punctuation was part of the solution, but to make sure readers clearly saw the difference, the initial approach involved using three spaces at the end of each sentence. That was quickly replaced by the convention of using two spaces after the period or other sentence-ending punctuation. There was one space after each word, and two to let you know the sentence was complete.
Early computer printers were essentially supercharged typewriters. Remember daisy wheels and dot matrices? Like the typewriters they sought to replace, most printed every character and space with the same exact width. (Most early computer monitors also displayed all characters and spaces with identical widths.)
So if you wrote your college papers using a typewriter or one of those early computer printers, you were taught to use two spaces at the end of a sentence. It’s also likely that your use of two spaces has persisted long after the need for doing so was eliminated.
How? The introduction of inkjet and laser printers brought the arrival of proportional spacing. In simple terms, that meant each character was printed at its own width — the Is were much thinner than the Ws, and punctuation marks like periods were even thinner.
It wasn’t a new idea. Books, magazines, newspapers, advertising, and other forms of communication that used professional typesetting had employed proportional spacing for more than a century. The new printer technology allowed everyone else to bring that style to their work and made the use of a second space unnecessary.
Continuing to insert that extra space at the end of a sentence is like showing up to a meeting in your dress-up wardrobe from the early days of your career. Leisure suits, platform shoes, and leather neckties — yes, those were all in my closet at one point, but when they went out of fashion, I stopped wearing them. But when younger co-workers see you inserting those two spaces after every sentence, they react as though you’d just walked into the meeting in a bright orange power blazer with enormous shoulder pads.
Styles and fashions change constantly. That applies to wardrobes — and it applies to writing. You’d never go out in public wearing what you wore 20 or 30 years ago. Well, you shouldn’t write the same way, either.
Two spaces after a period may be the most common example, but it isn’t the only one. One of the most significant changes in writing over the past couple decades is the replacement of male pronouns as the accepted “neutral” with plural counterparts. When the subject of a sentence was meant to be indeterminate, I was taught to use “he” or “he or she.” Today, the preferred choice is “they.”
Some people bristle at that because they take it as a challenge to their worldview in this era in which everything has become divisive and/or offensive, but honestly, it’s easier. Friendlier, too. More important, instead of focusing on your choice of pronouns, the reader will concentrate on the message you’re sharing, which is presumably far more important.
Other writing “rules” that were drilled into your head may no longer be valid. They’ve faded away, like the stuff you’d never wear. Ending sentences with prepositions? That’s fine. Starting sentences with conjunctions? It’s okay, too.
You may not like all those changes — just like you may wish you could once again rock that orange power blazer — but adopting them will keep you from standing out for all the wrong reasons.
Scott Flood creates effective copy for companies and other organizations. His guide to evaluating freelance creative talent, The Smarter Strategy for Selecting Suppliers can be downloaded at http://sfwriting.com/freeguide, and his blog is at http://sfwriting.com/blog.