Also, I am in Atlanta until Monday! There is no more snow, which I find disappointing as I like snow. But on the plus side, people can actually achieve work and school and things. (It is amusing as a Boston girl to hear the travails of my southern friends.)

~Sor

The extra space after a period is there for readability, the question isn’t one of whether the space is needed (it is) but how that space is created.

Before the days of typewriters, text was done by hand, either literally (pen and ink) or through a typesetting process. The extra space in those cases was created by the person setting the text.

But with the invention of the typewriter, which uses a mono-spaced font, the space had to be created by hitting the space bar twice. Since the machine put all the letters (including punctuation) the exact same space apart, the extra space had to be added in by the typist.

Now, with computers, the fonts (or at least all good fonts) are all kerned for all the pairs, so that that the extra space at the end of the sentence is created automatically. It’s not literally an extra *space* as in a space bar space, but there’s a little extra room in the kerning between a period and the subsequent capital letter.

So that’s why the extra space bar space isn’t used anymore.

And, P.S., as someone else mentioned, a hard extra space does create a real headache for anyone trying to use your text in any kind of publishing program.

~Angela :-)

I’ve just never even heard of not using too spaces. that just looks cramped!

Oh! And I agree with the article about violating quotations with injected commas and other punctuation. Until now I’ve felt bullied into doing it. But no more. From now on I will keep my quotations pure. Punctuation Anarchy!