Jen writes:
I recently completed a college English course and our instructor informed us that there is now only (1) space after a period instead of (2). My boss has researched this, and said that as far as he can tell, it’s still just (1) space. Help!
In the long-gone days of the typewriter, we always put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. This was a usage more or less required because every letter took up the same amount of space--an i took as much space as an m. (If you ever use the Courier typeface, you know what it looked like.) So two spaces at the end helped to distinguish a sentence-ending period from a period in an abbreviation like Dr. or Mr.
Most computer typefaces, however, give each letter just the space it needs. So, like the text in books and magazines, we need only one space after a period at the end of the sentence. I confess it took me a couple of years to break myself of that two-space habit once I'd shifted from typewriter to computer.
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