personal

Personal space

One space to bring them all and in the darkness book-bind them…

A casual observer, albeit one with access to Twitter and the patience to wade through my replies to other people yesterday, might think that I take Farhad Manjoo’s argument that you should never, ever use two spaces after a period much more seriously than I do.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t find it surprisingly fascinating. Because I did, enough to dig out my copy of the APA Publication Manual and argue the point over Twitter and elsewhere — although not enough to dig through more than a small handful of the comments on Manjoo’s original article. Internet comments can try any man’s patience.

From a writing perspective, I’m still not convinced it makes any significant difference how many spaces you use. Outdated or not, most style guides do suggest (or at least condone) the use of two spaces in draft manuscripts. And drafts are, by and large, the only thing that writers are themselves going to produce. It’s more an issue for publishers and typesetters than writers, quite frankly.

It’s also worth noting that the one remaining monospaced font mentioned in the article, Courier — which, as a monospaced font, would seem to suggest the continued need for two spaces after a period — is still the preferred manuscript font for many publications. According to author William Shunn’s oft-cited formatting guidelines:

For easy readability, limit your choice of font to either Courier or Times New Roman. Courier (my strong preference) is a monospaced font, which means that every character is exactly as wide as every other. It’s easier for an editor to detect spelling errors in a monospaced font than in a proportional font like Times New Roman (in which the “i” uses less horizontal space than the “m” does). With a monospaced font, there will also be fewer characters on each line, which can make your manuscript easier to scan.

Shunn goes on to acknowledge that “many writers have come to prefer Times New Roman” and that “either is usually acceptable,” but each publication is going to be different. Some editors won’t care what font you use, while some will be incredibly specific. I know Courier is the font I’d prefer to see when reading submissions to Kaleidotrope, for instance, but I won’t turn anything away as long as it’s at least readable. At work, we format the manuscripts we send to production in Times New Roman. As Jeff VanderMeer has noted, “Guidelines are among the roughest and least precise of god’s creatures. They’re usually there simply to ward off the most inappropriate of submissions.”

Vonda N. McIntyre’s manuscript preparation guidelines for the SFWA suggest using only Courier, adding:

The subject of proportional fonts is controversial. I recommend against them. Yes, they are prettier. But they were designed for publication, not for manuscripts. You mix typesetting and manuscript format at your peril.

I find this particularly interesting because John Scalzi, recently elected president of the SFWA, agrees with Manjoo, and quite strongly. But, as I wrote in response there:

In less formal (that is, the majority of) communication, it boils down mostly to two equally valid aesthetic choices — and/or is rendered moot by the automatic single-spacing that happens when, for instance, text is translated into HTML [browsers]. That is, it’s arguing over a pet peeve that’s almost never an actual issue, all in the name adhering to the way you were taught, or to proving the way we were all taught was wrong.

I thought Eric B. raised a few other interesting points over Twitter — he’s not wrong when he says, “There’s no *reason* most grammar rules have to be, other than readability and consistency.” — but I remain unconvinced. Does a difference in the number of spaces we use, one or two, truly impede readability, and is it actually an affront to consistency if my e-mails to you contain a different number of spaces than your e-mails to me? (Heck, even my dogged insistence on hyphenating “e-mail” puts me at inconsistent odds with a growing majority, yet I don’t think it’s unclear what I’m talking about. At least, not for that reason.)

In published documents, online or in print, meant for a wider audience than one’s own personal (or even internal business) communication, I do agree that one space should be the norm. Consistency should be the norm. But for draft manuscripts, particularly those written in that tenaciously monospaced Courier font, two spaces are in fact preferred. It may create a small amount of extra work for copyeditors and typesetters after the fact, who then need to turn those two spaces into one, but it creates less work for the editor who has to read the manuscript. And nowadays, that extra work shouldn’t often be more complicated than a few instances of find-and-replace.

For everything else, that personal and business communication I mentioned above, it either doesn’t matter, or one space is already the default. It comes down to aesthetics, which are important but subjective, and pet peeves, which are silly things to create rules around in the first place.

Friday the fourteenth

After a pair of not entirely uneventful days, today wasn’t much more than the very unexciting prelude to what promises to be a pleasantly uneventful three-day weekend.

And that, really, is all.

A so-so snow day

I went to sleep a little early last night. Even though I didn’t think the snow would be as apocalyptically bad as some of the heavier predictions, I thought I still might want to catch an earlier than usual train into Manhattan, should there be just enough snow to screw with my morning commute, but not enough to close down my office.

And that’s exactly how much snow there was. I called our office emergency number to confirm that we hadn’t closed due to the bad weather, and then I made the executive decision to be on the 7:20 train, rather than do the sensible thing and stay in bed all morning. Walking to the train station, which is only a block and a half away, proved to be surprisingly difficult, if only because the only spots that had seen a plow or a shovel yet were in the very middle of the road. But I made it to the station with plenty of time to spare — thanks, in no small part, to a thirty-minute delay.

I have to admit, after almost forty minutes of standing out in the cold of the station platform, during which time other trains would periodically fly past, kicking up sparks on the electrified rail and flinging powdery snow in everyone’s face — while announcements no more helpful than “the 7:20 train to New York is being delayed” played on what seemed like a near-constant loop — I came very close to making another executive decision and returning home. The thought of calling into the office, taking a vacation day, and spending it by lying in bed watching TV and reading seemed altogether preferable to freezing my ass off for a train that might never arrive.

But it did, finally, around 7:50. And I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the train that empty.

We arrived at Penn Station a little less than an hour later, which, despite the slowness of the train, the occasional roughness of the ride, and a few unexpected stops, is about normal. I got into work just before 9 o’clock.

Of course, it wasn’t a particularly exciting day from that point forward. A few people had obviously decided to stay home, but otherwise it was just a normal day at the office.

Until, that is, later in the afternoon, when a rally started up directly outside our building. The Haitian Consulate is across the street from us, and today marked the one-year anniversary of last year’s terrible earthquake in Port-au-Prince. It was difficult to work with the rally going on, since even four flights up they were incredibly loud, but they were for the most part peaceful. Police barricades, which had been sitting out on the sidewalk all week, were set up for them by the NYPD. It was only when a few of the demonstrators decided to block traffic on Madison Avenue altogether that things got a little out of hand. A few of us stood at windows overlooking the street as the police arrested a few and the rally dispersed.

And to think, I almost didn’t go into work today.

After that, it was back to the average Wednesday. I didn’t run into any problems on the train ride home — nowhere near as empty as in the morning, but still much less crowded — and I even managed to finish reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. (I might have more to say about that later, although maybe only after I’ve bought and read the next books in the trilogy. For now? I really liked it.)

Tomorrow, I have a conference I need to go to, filling in for a few hours at our sales booth at the Waldorf Astoria. So maybe I should go to sleep a little early tonight as well. Hopefully we won’t get any more snow for at least a little while.

The eleventh hour

Second verse, same as the first.

Today was all but indistinguishable from yesterday, beyond the panicked snow predictions for tomorrow. It’s snowing now, and they’re predicting anywhere from a foot to twenty inches, but I’m going to play it by ear and see how it looks in the morning. You know, before deciding this is the next blizzard to end all blizzards.

I suspect the weather will be just bad enough to make getting to work a hassle, but not bad enough to shut our office down entirely. Though, given that I was on vacation when our last snow day happened, I’m still sort of keeping my fingers crossed.