In ages past when adolescent women took a 'business track' in high school, they studied stenography (Gr.: short writing) usually referred to as "sten and transcription". 'Stenography' is the art of quickly writing dictated words by recording their sound patterns. 'Transcription' was the process of re-converting all those mysterious cryptic squiggles back into something legible. In general, that meant typing it onto paper. Naturally, one also had to become proficient at typing. One of the first lessons in typing class would have been 'double space between sentences', or 'double space after a full stop'.
The reason for the double-space was to give a visually-clear indication that one sentence was ending and another beginning. In the age of word processors, the habit of 'double space after a full stop' has become deprecated. That is, it is no longer taught, and is now considered improper. We live in a world of 'single space between sentences'. Most word processing software will actually remove what it considers 'extraneous blanks' between sentences. Even if you deliberately period-space-space as you type, MSWord may just erase all those 'errors' the first chance it gets. Well, really, does it make any difference? Let's see. To illustrate the change in visual clarity engendered by that change in policy, this paragraph has been keyed as 'single space between sentences'. All the others are keyed 'double space between sentences'. Can you detect the difference?
Admittedly, the change may be hard to detect, but as you read the text with your eyes there's a voice in your head that 'reads the text aloud' to you. It has a different pacing and you may be able to actually feel the presence or absence of a... pause?... between the sentences.
I am a great fan of that old double-space. Everything I write uses it. It's old-style. Why would anyone be such an old stick-in-the-mud? (Aside, that is, from enjoying being a curmudgeonly fuddy-duddy.)
When writing fiction (as I often do) control of pacing is something greatly to be desired. I want my readers to hear, to feel that pause between thoughts that often accompanies dialog between characters. Similarly, when writing a letter to someone who will personally read it, one may also want to control that pacing. That might mean eliminating that pause between thoughts to transmit a sense of urgency, or to include the pause to gently nudge the reader into a thoughtful mood.
Thankfully, in recent times it has become possible to customize one's word-processing software settings to prevent it eliminating all those laboriously typed spaces. For those who (like me, occasionally) write in HTML, there's a way to prevent the HTML processor from compressing the text: the non-breaking space. A non-breaking space is never eliminated; it is always kept. Its symbol is ampersand-nbsp-semicolon ( ). Each place where your eyes detect 'too many spaces' is the probable result of a non-breaking space after a period plus a regular space such that the reader software is forced to insert an empty character after the period and before the single space character that cannot be further compressed.
I hope that your own eyes will urge you to the position that the second paragraph here is the least easy to read, and that you'll come to value an extra space here and there in your own writing.
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Alas, your point is lost because you justified your text, so there are places where there ARE two spaces in your stop + 1 in paragraph 2, and places where individual words in a sentence have extra spaces between them, as on lines 2 and 3.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I was taught "old school," and my fingers sometimes remember their early training, I see the stop +2 in paragraph 1 as having "lakes" of white, especially before the last words on lines 2 and 3.