2008 June | Beyond the Elements of Style

The fascination of
words and writing

Archive for June, 2008

No More Double Spaces!

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

I may have addressed this already, but in the interests of both my sanity and new readers of my blog, I’m going to take it up again.

Repeat after me: it is no longer the convention to place two spaces between sentences.

To my amazement, this seems to be one of the most difficult changes to the way we produce copy for people to accept. And some simply don’t. One of my consulting clients, a marketing firm, has two very highly placed employees who refuse to believe me and continue to place the two spaces between sentences despite my constant and no doubt annoying entreaties to remove one of them. They’re both old enough to have taken typing classes on typewriters, so I’ll cut them a very little slack; but other clients, far younger, are having the same difficulty.

Yet there’s not a single usage guide today that advocates doing so. In fact, a colleague of mine tells me that when he was learning typesetting in 1954 he was told to not insert two spaces!

Typewriters use fixed-width or monosized fonts. Computer fonts (with the exception of Courier, meant to duplicate the look of a typewriter) do not. Treating computers like typewriters –– and making the assumption that rules that work with one will work with the other — is just plain silly.

There are a few resources out there that deal with this particular issue along with other transitions from fixed-font to variable-font devices: Robin Williams’ two books, The Mac is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Macintosh (as well as an edition for PC users) are excellent if a little dated (they came out as revised editions in 1995).

A succinct summary of the convention is available in an article in Upper and Lower Case Magazine, Double Spaces Between Sentences … NOT!, in which the author, Ilene Strizver, notes,

Conversely, nearly all computer fonts (except Courier) have proportional spacing, which means that the width of the characters and the spacing surrounding them are in proportion to each other. Proportional spacing results in a more even, balanced appearance. Because of this, a single space is enough to create the necessary visual separation between sentences.

So … don’t do it. One space after punctuation (periods are most frequently abused, though some writers add double spaces after colons, semicolons, and even commas as well) is the current law of the publishing land. Don’t make your manuscript stand out because of its errors, especially one as easily fixed as this one (a global search-and-replace will take care of it nicely).

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Posted in About Writing, Doing the Right Thing, Usage | No Comments »

Turkey City Lexicon

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

(It’s not just for SF fans anymore!)

It has often seemed to me that science fiction writers are the people most at home on the web, the people least surprised by its possibilities, the folks most likely to see its uses. This only makes sense: they are, after all, the ones most at ease with potential technology, spending their days writing coherent stories about complex possible worlds.

So it’s not surprising that they’ve come up with new and different ways to approach issues specific to writing and publishing.

During the early brouhaha over Publish America’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) as a publishing venue, it was a group of science fiction authors who banded together to disprove PA’s claim that it vetted manuscripts by composing a truly awful novel (that did, in fact, get accepted for publication). And it’s science fiction authors who co-host Predators and Editors, which has hopefully helped steer many unwitting authors-to-be in the right direction.

Not new, but not widely known, either, is the Turkey City Lexicon, a site meant to help science fiction writers workshop (or critique) each others’ work by giving them nice packages that say, far better than could any one individual, what might be problematic about a given passage. Named for the Austin, Texas workshop that was the cradle of cyberpunk, the lexicon has gone through a number of different editions (carefully uncopyrighted), and is as hilarious (and as thoughtful) today as it was back in 1988.

Here, for example, we can find Brenda Starr Dialogue (“long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters”), the Squid in the Mouth (“the failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth”), and the Kudzu Plot (“Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”).

Much of what is offered in the Lexicon is, in fact, very good advice for anyone writing anything, and I highly recommend reading it, laughing over it, and taking it to heart. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Posted in About Writing, Fiction, Technology, The Writing Life | No Comments »

Times Online!

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

The Times of London recently made its 200-year archive available at the Times Archives.

The presentation is very user-friendly: you can use the site search functionality, of course, but you can also click on a scrolling timeline, which allows you to browse for something that may be of interest. As a historical novelist myself, I’m very excited about the potential here, both for research and also — frankly — for trolling for ideas!

You’ll also see a separate photograph archive, some featured articles, the ability to do a single-day search (along the lines of “this day in history”), and Times recommendations.

Why am I so excited? After all, the History Channel’s been offering something similar on its site for years.

The point is that this is primary source material. It’s not someone’s account of what may have happened, it’s what the newspaper reported happening. Authentic, not too biased (no reports are completely unbiased), and arranged in such a way that the user can get information quickly and easily.

Note that there is currently a free introductory period for use of the archives; it’s unclear what the cost will be later on down the line, but it’s sure to be well worth it to those of us needing the resource. It has my vote for Site of the Month, that’s for sure! Check it out yourself, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

ADDENDUM: My colleague and friend Dick Margulis (he of Ampers&Virgule fame) has helpfully noted that “The date widget is day-month-year rather than the American-style month-day-year. So if someone is looking for news on a particular date, they should be careful to enter it in the right order.”

(You can tell that he’s beyond the elements of style!) Thank you, Dick!

Posted in Etc., Ideas, Research | No Comments »