We had a conversation about typography over dinner the other night.
Which is odd! And and a little bit uncomfortable! Design and typography are 75% taste, and when taste comes up at dinner, people can get defensive.
Maybe because a lot of designers are condescending blowbags in plaid skinny pants who make too big a deal about font choices and not enough of a deal about communication.
But this post is not about the awful Emporer’s New Clothes nature of graphic design. It’s about dinner on Sunday and punctuation.
Dave heard Terry Gross interview Farhad Manjoo on Fresh Air. Manjoo, the technology writer at Slate, recently wrote a piece called Space Invaders which begins:
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
In the column, he goes on to talk about the difference between monospaced (typewriter) fonts and proportionally spaced (computer) fonts, and how the written language evolved into and again out of the custom of using two spaces between sentences. I won’t go into it here; you can read it for yourself in Slate his article.
Manjoo is a one-space man, adamantly. Digital fonts have the correct amount of space after a period built into the period itself. You don’t have to add an extra space. If you do, you risk creating patchy-looking areas of type and interrupting the flow thought.
In her interview, though, Terry Gross gently but firmly disagreed with him. She learned from her mom, a secretary, that you put two spaces after a period. She also thinks using two spaces makes the text easier to read.
So my fam wanted to know, which is right?
Neither. Both. Depends.
The goal of professional typesetting is to create uniform areas of value from the type on the page. In other words, when you look at a page from a distance, the blocks of type should appear fairly homogenous. One paragraph should not be filled with white spaces while while another is jammed together and darker than the rest.
If you’re a graphic designer using professional typesetting software such as Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress to design a book or brochure or ad, you need to achieve that goal. People are paying you. So you leave out the extra space.
Most writing in the wild does not need to look professionally typeset. If you’re an attorney writing a brief, put in the extra space. Especially if all the other guys’ briefs have the extra space, and especially especially if the judge’s decisions have the extra space. Let someone else’s brief imply, “Your honor, you’re doing it wrong.”
If you’re a person who has never given this issue any thought in the past, don’t start worrying about it now. Pick a method and stick with it. Try to keep your writing consistent by not mixing one-space sentence endings with two-space sentence endings. You don’t want to seem flighty.
And relax. If you’re going to worry about your writing, worry about whether what you have to say is worth the trouble.
tags:intelligent design
Comments:
I agree with Manjoo, two spaces is utterly wrong. I think it’s harder to read because it slows me down. But then, I’m a graphic designer.
In truth, what it comes down to is what we’re visually used to seeing. Hundreds of years ago, people regularly read Gothic Blackletter type. Today, we classify it as decorative and use it only for headings because “it’s difficult to read.” But given that theory, since all professional print such as books and newspapers use only one space after a period and that’s what we see most, that should determine what’s easiest to read. And what’s right.
—Di Dec 2, 04:56 AMAnn, I loved your take on this much-argued controversy. As a typography teacher (with a pretty good set of eyes), I will weigh in on the one space after a period. I definitely agree that in page layout programs like InDesign, ONE SPACE after periods always looks better.
Now you have to take on the people who learn to “track” type to get rid of hyphens and once learning how to do it, go batshit crazy with that newfound skill, producing lines of type that look like they were put in a trash compactor.
—Mike Martin Dec 2, 07:46 AM
