111–120 of 174 posts
If the MLA says one space then it has changed since I was in school (~10 years ago). We were always told to use a double space at the end of a sentence and while he links to the Chicago MLA, the actual MLA website also eludes to the fact that it used to be two spaces: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're suppose to write the dot after the end of the parenthesis not before !
Actually, you should use a period inside parentheses if the enclosed material is meant to stand alone as a sentence. By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English. As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a pe…
If the MLA says one space then it has changed since I was in school (~10 years ago). We were always told to use a double space at the end of a sentence and while he links to the Chicago MLA, the actual MLA website also eludes to the fact that it used to be two spaces: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone-everyone!-said it was proper to use two spaces. What the articles fails to clearly menti…
In the case of the computer programmers, they were most certainly correct. Is the author really so quick to condemn while not realizing that programming is almost always done with monospaced fonts? Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
- write documents in a WYSIWYG editor
- don't publish those documents on the Web, or another setting where the reader's software (as opposed to the editor) makes decisions about how to display the text
Basically, this sounds like one more reason not to use Word (and similar), or share documents in .doc/.odt/etc. format [1]. It shouldn't even affect HTML email.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, you should use a period inside parentheses if the enclosed material is meant to stand alone as a sentence. By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English. As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a pe…
The double-tap on an iPhone only drops a period and single space, although I imagine it does reinforce a habit of double spacing.
- Some use two spaces because they are used to it. They are wrong, stupid and annoying.
- Author use two spaces because he's used to it. Why can't you see that he is correct?
To give an actual argument related to value, I think it is helpful to differentiate between periods that end sentences and periods that end abbreviations.
If two spaces is right and one space is wrong, why is it that I just opened up a half dozen books and saw that they only use single spaces? If two spaces is better for readability, why can't I find books using two spaces?
I doubt your books display themselves in monospaced fonts. My technical literature more often than not does.
If you're writing a technical manual, then you may want to use two spaces, but really isn't that something that would be handled by the printer?
On a similar note, I got a 0 on a paper once because it was not in the required font, Times New Roman. I had written it on my netbook while on vacation and printed directly from it and had not realized that the Linux distro installed automatically called Liberation Serif "Times New Roman" inside of Abiword.