He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.
Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.
He's the least technical "technology columnist" I've ever read.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should have been aware that yes, text is still often rendered in monospace fonts. His grasp of history is just horribly wrong: "Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts." He's talking about exotic hardware that was used by approximately no one.
Being a supposed technology columnist, he should also have done some research to find out how single and double spaces are rendered by word processors and email clients. Double-spacing is perfectly fine if word processors know what two spaces after a period mean and render it appropriately. I was taught that they do, so for me, double-spacing after a period seems like the perfect solution: double-spacing is the least bad solution for monospace fonts, and for proportional fonts, a double-space after a period will automatically be rendered correctly. If he wanted to do an actual service for his readers, he could have told us whether that is true or not. Since he is, you know, a technology columnist. Doesn't that title imply something beyond the ability to review smart phones?
The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work. [...] So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period.
The CMoS is hardly a final authority on the matter. It is just one common style, and is optimized for a particular presentation and publication style. It is also used by teachers to get students to write more words when their requirement is a page count.
Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words. For example, a standard space is 1em‡, but the space after the period is kerned to give a width of 1.5em‡‡. A typewriter on the other hand only has a single 1em space, so either use 1 space or 2. Also, I read once that they used 2 spaces on a typewriter to reinforce the ending of the sentence in case the period did not strike properly.
† Though newspapers are famous for tricks like this such as the missing oxford comma according the AP Stylebook, and I wouldn't put it past the newspapers to have done single spaces years ago for this reason. There are several differences between AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style to account for saving space.
‡ An em is the width of the lowercase m in the font.
‡‡ 1.5em isn't a hard and fast rule. The rule is wider than an em and less than 2 em's. It could be 1 1/3 is common as well. In reality, a designer spends agonizing amounts of adjusting the kerning on a font til it looks how they want.
An em is the width of an upper-case M. If you look at printed text you'll see that spaces are much narrower, in fact narrower than ens - compare a space with an en dash.
> Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words.
That's not "the modern convention of a single space"; that's "a return to the original convention of wider than a normal character width spacing". Note your reference to the width of the space being 1.5em, for instance.
Interesting data point when a comment on a forum so clearly surpasses an article written by a professional writer for an online publication.
This, ultimately, is why journalism is losing. The stuff the pros write is no better than the stuff other people write for free in blog posts and comments on forums.
Which is why paywalls don't work. The stuff behind them isn't better enough that readers will pay to get at it.
I have bad news for you: I'm a professional writer.
I just happen to be much better at it than that hack, even though he probably gets paid more. Of course, the reason he (probably) gets paid more is that he writes for Slate, while I write for TechRepublic. Since he's supposed to be a technology writer for Slate, and I'm basically any kind of writer for TR (specifically security, open source issues, and programming, but that's not relevant in this case), you can pretty much bet money that I know more about the subjects our writings have in common than him, despite the fact he probably gets paid more for his ignorance than I do for my knowledge.
So it goes.
In any case, I really appreciate the implicit compliment, despite the fact this comment at HN was very much off the cuff and not among my best recent writings. I agree it's better than the Slate piece, though perhaps primarily because the Slate writer didn't set the bar very high.
By the way, I scraped together a longer, more in-depth version of my HN comment that you liked for my personal devlog:
I think it's better written than my HN comment, too.
edit: Of course, I became a professional writer by making comments in discussions at TechRepublic that people liked, so maybe I don't qualify as the type of "professional writer" you meant to address.
You must be careful when comparing the worst to the best. Farhad has been a crummy technology writer since he was at Salon, and this is basically the only site on which I read comments. I would much rather read a great story by a great journalist than any comment by the average Youtube commenter.
Well put. I learned to type on an old fashioned IBM typewriter when I was in middle school. We were taught the two spaces after a period rule and that's so burned into my mind that it takes effort to use a single space after a period.
This really felt like a two page rant over something that very few people in the world even notice when reading, and even fewer would care. On the other-hand, unlearning the two-space rule for someone who touch types fast enough to transcribe most people's speaking speed in real-time is going to take an enormous amount of effort.
Even if I agreed with the statements presented in the article I didn't find anything compelling enough to justify the effort of retraining my fingers.
Another writing convention I read long ago which grew out of typewriter limitation is placing a comma or period within quotation marks when not part of the quotation as in:
I'm a fully qualified "hacker."
The period is not part of the quotation, but American writing style suggests it should still go within the quotation marks. America appears to be the only English speaking country to have this writing style; it's not that way in Britain, for example. I read this was due to something like ink splotching (or possibly it was jamming up of keys, which apparently gave us the non-optimum QWERTY layout) from where the typewriter would strike the page on mechanical typewriters when typing quickly if leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as logic would dictate. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but I generally rebel and use the British style when writing, especially in informal situations like posting online comments.
Even in America, MLA says you should place commas and periods outside quotation marks (unless they're part of the quote), whereas Chicago says you should place them outside. I prefer to put them outside quotation marks; there's a reason why this style is called "logical punctuation". MLA usually gets ignored in America, though.
I'm wondering if the reason MLA is usually ignored in America is that there is some truth to what I read about typewriters influencing the illogical style, which modern day editors seem to insist upon.
Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.
The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.
As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.
For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.