AC question

Shove it up your your ass you piece of shit child molesting cult follower.

What college did you attend and what degree did you get, just curious.

Only the editorial director at the last agency I worked for -- Bloody Mary, who would slit your throat for a misplaced comma.

If your father is an editor, and assuming he was an editor before we had desktop computers, ask him this: When you're writing for publication, is it correct to place *two* spaces after terminal punctuation in a sentence? Under what circumstances, and why?

Any real editor can answer this.

Keep diggin' , the hole isn't deep enough .

The instructor for the Governmentese writing class I took at MITRE suggested two spaces between sentences. In practice anyone who had aquired "Ph.D" after their name could write any way they wanted.

jsw

Yeah. And then people like me get stuck with editing their stuff into something that actually can be read. d8-)

I'd much rather write, but in the medical field, I mostly edit.

Since it's unlikely anyone else will comment on the two spaces, it was standard practice when typewriters produced monospaced type (with a couple of exceptions), and the variation in visual space between letters (glyphs) made it difficult to tell whether there was a space after a period -- and periods themselves are hard to see when the type is all wobbly from monospacing. So, probably for 100 years, writers enterred two spaces after periods, exclamation points, and question marks, to make it easy on the typesetters. It also carried over to everyday typewriting, with the double-space being a stylistic option.

This continued for years afterward, even after it made work more *difficult* for typesetters, because they had to extract the extra spaces in an electronic file, before committing the writing to type. It was common through the mid-'90s. In medical editing, I saw it as recently as four or five years ago, mostly from older writers who just couldn't break the habit.

As for editing the professional writing of Ph.Ds, I demand combat pay for that, especially when I have to argue with them.

As an educated insider I quickly acclimated to the seemingly stilted and formulaic writing style of chemistry and electronics. The canned phrases have specific, well-defined meanings just like legal jargon and variations on them can become misleading. For me they make speed-reading through the material easier.

jsw