Regurgitation Wednesday: How do you Space?

Welcome Back to regurgitation Wednesday and today we are going to attack the idea: how many spaces goes after the period before the start of a new sentence. Depending on your age, I’m sure some of you all took a keyboarding class or two. If not I’m sure you have used a typewriter before the fancy dancy computers came along.  In the good old days, two spaces were the norm, because of the font typewriters used, it helped to visually see where a sentence began and ended. So we adopted the two space rule.

But with everything, times have changed. In E-Publishing the rule is one space after the period. And this comes partically from formatting issue when converting files into publishable formats that we all love to read on our readers. Not only does it come down to a formatting issue, it comes down to the font issue. With technology, comes change. Now we have multiple readers, multiple fonts and multiple hands changing the details. We no longer need the extra space for our eyes to distinguish sentences.

Try this challenge, ask those around you… how many spaces do you put between sentences? You’ll be surprised. More than surprised. The reason for this regurgitation topic came from my RWA chapter loop buzz. This weekend one of the members sent a link to a wonderful article on the dreaded space question and oh my, my, my did it cause a flurry of emails. All good.

We have multi-published authors in our group and they all had different ideas on space. Most in the e-publish arena use one space, and most with the traditional use two. One just had her rights reverted back to her books so she can now put her back list up as e-books. She had to take all the extra spaces out of her novels.  As you can see the issue that enslues because more and more publishers have e-book clauses now. And to have e-book formatting you’ll need a single space. You could just image the emails. Whose doing it wrong and whose doing it right… Well once again it will depend on the Publisher. In my experience with e-publishing I’ve had to take out all the double spaces after the period. Typically you can find and replace the spaces with the edit function in the most software. And then, train yourself not to add the extra space. Try as you might, but try.

Here are two websites that just get the conversion going. Enjoy.

• http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.1.html
• http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2011/01/burning-issue-of-the-day-after-a-period-one-space-or-two/

Thank you for regurgitating with me, come back the next topic.