Wednesday, April 30, 2008

wrong. wrong. wrong.

although i will never, never, never use the words "journal" or "impact" as verbs, and i will never (even upon threat of torture) say this sentence: "it was a fun trip for m and i,"* i have lived my entire life thus far believing that the correct way to type was with a double space after every period. and i'm wrong. and everyone else on the internets seems to know this except me. even as i write this, i am physically incapable of not putting two spaces after each and every period. it's pure luck that my blog organizes itself typographically with hardly any input from me. it's not my fault, though: i was trained that way, in tenth grade typing class on an ibm selectric by a woman who was also the cheerleading coach, and who chanted, "A, A, A, space! semi, semi, semi, space! S, S, S, space! L, L, L, space!" etcetera.


*why, oh why, does the whole world think this is correct? why? why?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

john just pointed this out to me last year and i've adjusted. but it still seems wrong. very wrong.

Liz Woodbury said...

i'm so glad i wasn't the only one!

Anonymous said...

Thank god Walter Weissman wasn't misguided enough to instill such a ridiculous habit during my 12th grade typing class. Each of sentences is separated by one, and only one, space. I've never really felt superior about that until just now.

Dancer Lady

Anonymous said...

Right, right, right --for typing on a typewriter. The rules changed when we moved to keyboarding with word processors and began to follow the standards of typesetting.

(The IBM Selectric was a transitional tool with variable letter spacing, like typesetting, anticipating the look we have now on a computer screen.)

--Pop

Anonymous said...

I'm crushed! The two spaces after every period is one of my core values.