The Plight of the Spacebar

Below is an email I sent out to our staff:

The Plight of the Spacebar

Humanitarian efforts are popping up all over the place. Today, I would like to talk to you about the plight of the spacebar. Every day millions of spacebars are misused, mistyped and misunderstood. For years we were taught to slap that bar twice at the end of a sentence. No longer can I sit idly by and not speak up for the battered spacebar. Stand up and fight back! I came across a rebel website which speaks into this plight:

On a typewriter, every character is monospaced; meaning, they each take up the same amount of space—the letter “i” takes up as much space as the letter “m” For this reason, people who learned to type on a typewriter were taught to put two spaces after a period making it easier to see where one sentence ends and the next begins. But…

On a computer the characters are proportional; meaning, they take up a proportional amount of space. The letter “i” is narrower than an “m,” for example, and putting extra space between sentences doesn’t do anything to improve readability. Therefore, you no longer need extra space to separate sentences and only need to hit the space bar once.

Of course, this one space rule applies to spacing after colons, semi-colons, question marks, exclamation points, or any other punctuation you can think of.

Just think of the children! All of those spaces running around causing design departments across the globe trouble. Join the revolution and help stop double spacing the end of sentences!

Brought to you in part by DUDS (Department of Unnecessary Double Spaces) and Marcom.

Excerpt from: Fat Rabbit Creative

~Hosh~