The Space Between

Pet peeves. We all have them. One of my biggest pet peeves involves the sentence I’m about to write.  See that? Can you guess what it is?

It’s silly, really. Something that makes no real difference in the grand scheme of things.

However, because my work requires me to write documents shared with fellow collegues who are also writing, editing, adding to said documents, it drives me crazy.

Consistency. That’s what I really long for. What is my problem? My problem is that little dot that follows our sentences. The dot that’s called a period. No, actually, that isn’t my problem. My problem is the space that follows that dot that we call a period. THAT is my problem.

Is anyone else out there as neurtic about such trivial matters as me? Well, yes!

As a high school student, back before everyone and their pet kitty owned personal computers, I took a keyboarding class. Now, I’m not quite so old to have learned keyboarding on a typewriter, but I did learn on a DOS computer.

At that time, we learned that when you finish typing a sentence, you add two spaces after the period. And so that was my habit. Fast forward 5 or 6 years to my sophomore year at college when I learned in my public relations writing class that I had been doing it ALL WRONG! Why is that? Because modern word processing programs automatically adjust for the space after a period and therefore only one manual spacebar press is necessary. Adding a second space in there produces an awkward amount of space.

So for the last fifteen years, I’ve typed only one space and it is now my custom, my habit. When I see an extra space, I delete it. And I delete a lot of spaces, which tells me that many people operate under the same lessons I learned in my high school keyboarding class. And it drives me crazy.

I imagine the only way you’ve made it through my little diatribe is because you, at some level, are as crazy as I about silly matters that really don’t make a difference. Welcome! I’m so glad to not be alone.