Saturday, January 15, 2011

[Friday Free Day] Periodic Space-age

Some of the blogs I like and follow (Ahem, follow... because Following a blog shows you like it, and keeps the blogger from thinking she is sad and alone in the blog-o-sphere) have a weekly post with music or something interesting like a Music Monday, Saturday Stash, or a Tunes-Day. So...

Introducing the Friday Free Day! (this week on a Saturday!)

On Friday Free Day I will talk about whatever I want. I realize I do that every other day, but I think I'll try to keep it to Fridays now, and focus on actual cape-wearing on the other days. Some teachers or school programs have a Friday Free Day in their classrooms. I don't. I think it wastes a whole day. So this is not a blog post about what to do on a Friday Free Day.

Today (yesterday), I want to talk about the number of spaces to put after a type-written period. When I was forced to take typing in middle school (waaaay back in the 80's), we were taught to use two spaces. I have done this ever since. Until yesterday. My Caped Brother sent me an article about the silliness of this habit. The actual article irritated me because the guy was kind of an ass in it, but the idea reminded me that I had heard this somewhere before. I did some research, as I am wont to do. It turns out that in this computerized era, the fonts do the work for you. They are proportional and make the extra space unnecessary (articles here and here). This sounds vaguely familiar, and I have noticed that my posts can sometimes look wonky online. I am wondering if this is due to my extra space-age.

Now comes the hard part. How do I stop putting two spaces in?  Since yesterday I have done a lot of writing and used two spaces almost EVERY time. That last period I didn't, but I literally had to lift my thumb off of the space bar and twirl it a little to keep myself from doing it. I also had to cut and paste my most recent post in to a Word document and find/replace all of my double spaces with single spaces. Creature of habit? Yes.

I just had to go back into that paragraph and fix the spacing. Arg. Those last two periods, too.  Pffft.

I looked about some information on changing a habit. I've read before that it takes between 21 and 28 days. Perhaps if I post every single day for 21 days I'll fix it? Actually, I'll be doing a lot of writing in the next couple of months for my National Board Renewal. Maybe that will fix it? Argh! I just did it again. This is going to be very difficult.... :(

2 comments:

  1. How about a contradictory comment from your OTHER brother (my "caped" status is still to be determined).

    The American Psychological Association just... after years of my trying to adjust from two spaces to one... decided to change their standards to say TWO spaces.

    Check the first point on the fourth chapter of the following link: http://www.apastyle.org/manual/whats-new.aspx

    So... I think we're still fine with either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have TWO caped brothers! And a caped sister!

    ReplyDelete