The (Extra) Space Between
One or two: my journey in modernizing myself
Take a trip down memory lane with me. You walk into a classroom filled with computers with wooden boxes covering their keyboards. Depending on your age you either launch a program or grab a floppy disk from your teacher, but the results are the same and you enter into a world consisting of another teacher: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Along with lessons on which SHIFT key to use and propelling a virtual canoe to increase your typing speed, you likely learned to use two spaces after a period.
Regardless of the strategy or the software, almost all of us went through a typing or keyboarding class growing up. Computers were the wave of the future, and kids needed to know how to type properly. Typing, of course, was nothing new, and was a valuable skill that had been taught for decades. However, with the increasing reliance on computers, and with one in every home, the need for every child to know this skill increased.
Typing, in the sense of print making, has been around for centuries, and spacing seems to have been a discrepancy from the start. I’m by no means an expert in typography (it begins and ends with knowing not every nature-loving business should use Papyrus), and having transitioned to single space in 2020 (spoilers!) I can’t be even considered a novice. When typewriters were introduced, these standards continued to be followed, and onward to computers.
Fast forward
I enter the corporate world, having happily elongated all my college papers by those extra spaces. My first job had an unofficial style guide that included two spaces after a period. Perfect, I was trained for this. I update Word’s grammar checker to ensure two spaces, and I’m off to the races. I continue down this path for all reports, presentations, and even Excel worksheets. I knew one-space was a thing, but these extra spaces weren’t doing me any harm, so I kept plodding along.
The turn
Trouble began brewing after my move to Denver and gentle ribbing by friends who wrote and edited for a living. “Cardinal sin,” “save yourself some time,” and “you’re writing older than you are” were thrown about. I didn’t really care, as it had worked professionally for so long and I had no interest in writing as a hobby outside of some coding, which is far more picky with punctuation.
The thing with friends is that they never forget, and they have no problem bringing up your lesser errors any time they can. The crossover between the personal and professional realm exists in resume reviews, business plans, and other public writing. Was I inadvertently appearing older with two spaces in my resume? Did it matter? After doing some poking around, I figured it was time for a change.
As a New Year’s resolution for 2020 (because what else could upend my work in 2020 more than this), I decided to modernize by switching to only using one space instead of two. It only took two weeks to retrain my thumbs for a period, and two months for a colon. The main issue I had was reviewing and revising all of my previous work that centered around a two-space existence. I didn’t update everything on January 2nd, but I couldn’t leave them unchanged when edits were necessary.
Now, does it matter? Maybe. All I really know is that when you’re putting yourself out there via a business plan or a resume, it’s important to represent yourself in the best light possible; it might be the only thing the people making the decisions ever knows about you. Proper formatting, punctuation, and yes, possibly spacing, might be the thing they are looking for if the job requires significant report writing or adhering to a style guide.
The world is increasingly an ever changing place, and it’s important to stay up to date. Whether it is the latest social media fad or choosing sides on punctuation war that has been ongoing for centuries, it’s never too late to learn new tricks.
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