Where One Ends and Another Begins

Been busy the last several days with some things while the rest of my family has been on vacation. Days filled with work around my house or being away from my house. Usually I try to write my entries in the evenings, but Friday was a Law and Order marathon on USA (I'm a big Law and Order junkie), and Saturday and Sunday USA was playing National Treasure (which I hadn't seen before). So I've had neither the time during the day, nor the attention during the night to add entries, although I've had some things pointed out to me by MSN Messenger buddies that would make for good articles.

Right now, I'm trying to work on an update to Skewed during my lunch break at work, since I haven't done one in almost a month now. While doing this, I was reminded of some discussion, either on Notebook Forums or in English class in High School, on writing, particularly the space between sentences.

For a long time, I always written with two spaces between sentences, as that was how I was taught was proper for typed writing. This particular discussion was started because of that, with someone commenting (again, I'm not sure where this discussion was, so it was either a comment on my writing directly, or just a general comment). The comment came up that two was not necessary, only one was needed.

The answer is both, it depends on the actual writing. I learned how to type in my early elementary school, so it was between my Commodore 64 and my school's 286 machines. These both all used monospaced fonts, where the letter always used the same total space no matter the actual width of the letter. When typing with monospaced fonts, it's harder to discern the space between sentences, so you're supposed to write with two spaces. But with variable-width fonts, such as used by modern word processors and the main of the internet, it's easier to tell such things, so one space is sufficient and two spaces is not particularly necessary.

So in the end of the discussion, both sides were right. Nowadays, I only write with one space between sentences, as my writing habits have changed.