Everything I've Ever Known About Punctuation Is Wrong

Apparently everything I have ever known about punctuation is flat out wrong. Or so says this lengthy article from Slate.com. It sort of reminds me of that traumatic incident in high school, where, having written extra credit papers about famous mathematicians as a class we were shocked to be docked points for using contractions. Since when, we asked is it a crime to use contractions in a paper? Always,came the answer of our math teacher. Shocked and dismayed we all didn't believe her for a moment and ran crying to our English teacher only to be told the exact same thing.

As a result, I don't think I've used contractions in any formal writing that I've done since. So it is a big surprise to find out that two spaces after a period is, in fact, grammatically incorrect. Though in retrospect, this shouldn't surprise me all that much. Being on the school paper in high school, one of the oddities of journalistic writing that we were taught was that there was only one space after a period instead of two- I just assumed that it was one of the weird exceptions for journalistic writing and kept happily adding two spaces after my periods for everything else I wrote. Reading this article gave me a more coherent and in fact, sensible explanation as to why one period is better than two.

First, there's the matter of the typewriter: with the rise of the personal computer, two careful spaces after every period made less and less sense until now, when it makes no sense at all. The vagaries of the typography of the typewriter, the article explains necessitated an extra space after periods to keep letters from running together- that, I guess, is no longer necessary.

Secondly, there's the matter of aesthetics: apparently typographers go crazy over extra spaces. It's like one of their trade secrets that they can nerd out about- (leaving aside the fact that there are tyopgraphers out there. That sort of surprises me. I think typographer and I think 'Guttenburg Printing Press' type of thing. Albrecht Durer and company...) But does it look better with one space as a posed to two? I don't know- you tell me. I've been trying my best to keep it at one space, since it's now the correct thing to do, and I think I've been fairly successful, but it's hard to break a habit that you've been used to for years now.

So grammarians of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose save our extra spaces!