How? By doing one simple thing. It’s easy. Trust me. I’m going to share one of my biggest irritations as a writer/editor—extra spaces.
Yes, you heard me correctly. I dislike extra spaces, specifically the ones that appear after a period.
I spent today editing materials for a client who clings to old habits and here is what I told him:
Back in the day of typewriters, typists needed to insert two spaces after a period to separate sentences for easy reading. This was necessary because the key for the period was tiny and it was often obscured by the text around it. The reader needed that extra space to identify the end of the sentence. The extra space increased readability.
When computers came along, designers were kind enough to add that extra space into the kerning for the period key. No extra spaces required. In fact, the extra space is not only no longer required, but adding it causes problems. For editors.
Here’s why:
Every added space increases the white space behind the period to three, which is a large amount of white space. It causes the reader’s eye to stop. Not a full stop like a normal period, but a stop as in a “what’s going on here?” stop. It’s the kind of stop that alters the way sentences are read, which affects flow. It also hampers scanning because the white space is large enough to capture the eye when it should not.
In other words, the extra spaces are death. They kill readability and look terrible on the page. Editors hate them. Why? Because the editor has to mark or remove every extra space. This is not fun. Particularly when the document or manuscript is long. I have left notes to the writer to remove them on their own, but those notes are often ignored, leaving the problem on the page.
Removing the spaces is a time-consuming task that does nothing to enhance the writing itself. It is a formatting issue. It is frustrating and can drive a normally sane editor to rant.
So I beg of you, please do not add two spaces behind your periods. When a sentence ends, place your period and move on.
Trust me, you will make every editor happy. At least with your periods. I can’t speak to other issues now, but I will follow this blog with another on more editing pet peeves.
What are your writing or editing pet peeves?