Space Cadet

One cold December day, in a galaxy not far away, an art director emailed me his Letter to Santa. “All I want for Christmas is a copywriter who consistently uses one space after the period between sentences.” 

Okay, Okay. I’m an idiot. My only excuse is that I learned to write on a typewriter back when you were supposed to tap, tap two bloody spaces at the end of a sentence. Then, out of nowhere, cyberspace reared its ugly head, and the keyboard became king. A fight broke out in my brain. When my right thumb would hit the space bar twice, my left hand would sometimes slap it. Often, my right hand would slap back harder, and two spaces would prevail over one. My copy turned into a mishmash of space baiting and spatial inequality, and the dog was visibly frightened by it all. 

Since that humbling holiday season, I’ve done my very best to put just one lonely space between every sentence -- happy, Randy? But I still can’t promise I won’t space out from time to time.  Curses, that last sentence had two spaces at the end. I can only hope that in my next life, space bars will serve drinks.

For more about monospaced fonts (which is apparently not a disease you get from kissing your keyboard), check out Grammar Girl.