I need my space!

I need my space back!  I don't like this new spacing rule, it's claustrophobic.

No, I'm not talking about my husband, I like him.  It's this relatively recent rule about spacing between sentences.  Yes, it bothers me enough I felt the need to write a post about it.  (Notice, I'm using two spaces between sentences.)  Why did it have to change?  What was the real reason behind this space conspiracy?

I know that if I was back in middle or high school trying to write my essay the night before it's due, this new space rule would make me...upset, yes, let's go with upset.  It doesn't seem like that much of a difference, however if you are writing several pages and take out one space every line or two...yep, it makes more of a difference.  Some will argue that if you are writing quality stuff in the first place this space dilemma would not make that much of a difference.  Well, I don't write quality stuff...never have!  I'm one of those kids that wrote enough crap to get to the two or three page quota.

I actually typed in "one space or two after a period" into Google and it shot back 65,200,000 responses.  Seriously?  Evidently I am not the only one then.

According to the MLA style writing and a few other websites, the single space after a period was adopted in the beginning of the 20th century.  This was mainly because people used anywhere from one to four spaces after a period.  (Four spaces?  I could have written pure gold in high school with that much space!)  Then the poor typewriter comes along with it's spacing issues, so people started inserting two spaces after periods to show the end of a sentence clearly.  Now that we have better fonts and the poor typewriter is ancient, we are now expected to revert to the original one space after a period. Also, this "new spacing rule" changed around the time we started using computers regularly...in the 1970's. Considering I was born during the late 70's, why didn't I know this rule already? Evidently, my schools didn't get the memo.

My husband used to be a two spacer also. When he was in graduate school he wrote a LOT of papers. During this period, his thesis adviser convinced him that a single space was now the way to go. My husband was led astray by the prospect of better grades due to correct punctuation skills.

Once again, I am on the other side of quality writing, because my thumb just won't click once on that evil space bar. Now I am caught between what feels right and what is correct.  Most everything I type or text now is all sorts of screwed up on spacing. Even now, after every sentence I hit that space bar twice, then the backspace key.

Incidentally, the first few paragraphs were written with two spaces, while the last were written using only one, lonely space. To me there is no blatant difference between the two. If you are reading an email or something casual, the double space allows your eyes to skim easier. Unfortunately, I have to concede that the single space seems cleaner, professional almost. I guess if you are emailing a friend or another crap writer, the double space will work.  However, if you are writing a paper or wanting to be published, the single, lonely space is probably the way to go.

I should create a club called the 3 Tap Typers:  after a period, you tap the space bar twice, then tap the backspace once. I have a feeling this will be a long process with me, so you conformists need to be patient!

Writing is hard

Writing for some people is very easy, my husband fits into this category.  He actually would like to write his own novels or even ghost write an autobiography for someone important in the future.  He can sit down and type away for minutes and it results in this almost poetic story.  That was just an email announcing his football pool has started or something else trivial.  It's disgusting really.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading whatever it is he writes, but the ease at which he is able to do it, sickens me.

Writing is easy for some people.  I am not one of those people.  For those of you who are Grammar Police, back off!  I'm trying!  I use spell check and when it yells at me for passive tense, I try my best to fix it.  However, the other day I got so confused between passive voice and past tense that my husband had to edit my last post.  He blathered something about the difference between passive voice and past tense, then he mumbled something about not using conjunctions either.  (Ha!  I used one there, didn't I?) Ugh!  I do what I always do, I asked him for help.  Help means "please rewrite this stupid thing, because the words are blurring together for me?!" 

The truth is, my entire life I have always had help writing papers or reports.  I'm not talking about people who pay someone to write it for them, or they just copy it off the web.  I have never and never will use plagiarism.  I had help from my parents.

In the beginning I would actually put effort and a little hope in a paper I wrote.  Then I would have my parents review it, in order to receive their praise and admiration.  What would be returned to me, would be this paper with so many marks on it, it looked like the ink smeared or someone used it as a tourniquet, if I was lucky enough to get the red pen.  My hopes dashed, I would fix the mistakes and go on my way.  Later, I think it began to be apparent to my parents that there was no hope in my writing skills.

They tried the whole "make an outline, then write from your outline" method.  I just couldn't grasp the whole Introduction, Body and Conclusion part of book reports or research papers.  During college it became blindingly clear that there was no hope for me.  I would submit a paper to my parents for review, then get back an entirely different paper, full of remarks and wording fixes.  It got rather depressing.

Fortunately I chose a science major so, writing papers wasn't a huge deal, because no one else could write well either.  We left that up to the English, History and Journalism majors.

 Fast forward a few years, my daughter is in kindergarten.  She is learning to write sentences and paragraphs.  She does it with such ease and enjoyment, I start to feel happy that she will take after her father.  Then I realize that I'm learning with her.  Yes it took a kindergarten teacher to begin this process.

"Every story needs a great beginning (introduction), you have to get people to be interested in what you are writing.  Then, you need to include sentences about your topic that are descriptive and fun (body), so people will continue to read.  Last, you need to have a great ending (conclusion) so people will know that you are done writing."  The quotation marks are real, my 5 year old daughter said this to me one day during her writing homework.

So here is a salute to my parents and to my husband:  Thank you for passing on your genetics to our daughter, she will be the one who finally teaches me how to write!