Eff single spaces after periods

[HeK]

[cbre88x]

It's the devolution of our language and i wont stand for it one more day!

I think of text talk as more of a hybrid. I don't really use it too much anyways..only when I break my 160 character limit per text..God I hate that.

[Versus]

I actually never noticed until now. Single, because double is unnecessary.

[K2]

It's interesting looking back at other posts from the double-spacing advocates and realizing I never noticed that they double-spaced.

But yeah, double-spacing seems pointless and unnecessary to me.

[Fail Medic]

Two after, one mid.  Old habits die hard.  I think I do prefer the visual cue of a wider space between sentences.

If that's an indication of homosexuality, then brb watching 9 Dead Gay Guys.  Space.  Space.

[rumsfald]

As someone who grew up with double, single is the new way of academia and of business. (outside of marketing, which is really a bunch of Fyre's smoking cloves and asking each other, "Will people like this?")

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish.

@Surf, Ianki, Crow, etc...In Soviet Russia, Old Man Rummy gets off of your lawn.

[Blues]

I've always viewed double spacing as one of those stupid fuck elitist ideas that have no reason for existing other than "I AM DIFFERENT AND SUPERIOR!"

Sort of like Americans who insist on spelling things like "colour".

Also I don't think most people pay that much attention to the spacing, except double spacers.

[Eschatos]

I use double, because when I write papers it fills up the page more.

[Luinbariel]

I use single simply because it was how I was taught, and it's what I think looks nice.

Also, if you're looking to pad your essays, don't double space; adjust the font size of all the periods in your paper. It is virtually undetectable and can easily add pages to your paper if needs be.

[Blues]

16 pt font on a period doesn't change the period size due to some Word glitch, but exponentially increases spacing (equally, so you can't actually tell). If you type up 2 pages worth of material, you get a 3 page essay. If you type up 20 pages, you get a 60 page essay. I dunno if it still works that way, but it did back when I was in middle school.

[Radio Raheem]

oh god damnit noone ever told me that trick

[HeK]

16 pt font on a period doesn't change the period size due to some Word glitch, but exponentially increases spacing (equally, so you can't actually tell). If you type up 2 pages worth of material, you get a 3 page essay. If you type up 20 pages, you get a 60 page essay. I dunno if it still works that way, but it did back when I was in middle school.

Since Word supports TureType Fonts, which are vector graphics, it can render any size you can define. Thus a 16 point period is visibly larger then a 12 point period. The reader would be hard pressed to see the difference unless the two were typed next to each other.

The key to the results from this trick is not the horizontal, or character spacing increased from the font size, but rather the vertical or line spacing. Since a period is set directly on the lower character alignment, an increase in size intrudes into the lower line of text. This forces Word to increase the spacing between lines by a fraction of an inch.

The results are hardly exponential, at least from Word 97 and on. Using a thirty-seven page document that I have handy, which is written mostly in 10 point Ariel, I gain one half of a page by increasing the size of the periods to 16 point. If I were to go to a visible extreme and increase the period font to 36 point, I would jump to a total of thirty-nine pages.

[Blues]

[quote author=Pokemon Trainer Blues link=topic=2904.msg84034#msg84034 date=1242706050]
16 pt font on a period doesn't change the period size due to some Word glitch, but exponentially increases spacing (equally, so you can't actually tell). If you type up 2 pages worth of material, you get a 3 page essay. If you type up 20 pages, you get a 60 page essay. I dunno if it still works that way, but it did back when I was in middle school.

Since Word supports TureType Fonts, which are vector graphics, it can render any size you can define. Thus a 16 point period is visibly larger then a 12 point period. The reader would be hard pressed to see the difference unless the two were typed next to each other.

The key to the results from this trick is not the horizontal, or character spacing increased from the font size, but rather the vertical or line spacing. Since a period is set directly on the lower character alignment, an increase in size intrudes into the lower line of text. This forces Word to increase the spacing between lines by a fraction of an inch.

The results are hardly exponential, at least from Word 97 and on. Using a thirty-seven page document that I have handy, which is written mostly in 10 point Ariel, I gain one half of a page by increasing the size of the periods to 16 point. If I were to go to a visible extreme and increase the period font to 36 point, I would jump to a total of thirty-nine pages.
[/quote]
Maybe we used 95. All I know is it was explained to me that way by someone back then, and it most certainly gave more than a half page increase after like the 2 page mark. I haven't tried the trick since middle school, I often found myself typing much more than was required when I did essays for high school, so I wasn't aware they had fixed the glitch/bug/whatever caused it.

[Luinbariel]

[quote author=HeK link=topic=2904.msg84047#msg84047 date=1242708153]
[quote author=Pokemon Trainer Blues link=topic=2904.msg84034#msg84034 date=1242706050]
16 pt font on a period doesn't change the period size due to some Word glitch, but exponentially increases spacing (equally, so you can't actually tell). If you type up 2 pages worth of material, you get a 3 page essay. If you type up 20 pages, you get a 60 page essay. I dunno if it still works that way, but it did back when I was in middle school.

Since Word supports TureType Fonts, which are vector graphics, it can render any size you can define. Thus a 16 point period is visibly larger then a 12 point period. The reader would be hard pressed to see the difference unless the two were typed next to each other.

The key to the results from this trick is not the horizontal, or character spacing increased from the font size, but rather the vertical or line spacing. Since a period is set directly on the lower character alignment, an increase in size intrudes into the lower line of text. This forces Word to increase the spacing between lines by a fraction of an inch.

The results are hardly exponential, at least from Word 97 and on. Using a thirty-seven page document that I have handy, which is written mostly in 10 point Ariel, I gain one half of a page by increasing the size of the periods to 16 point. If I were to go to a visible extreme and increase the period font to 36 point, I would jump to a total of thirty-nine pages.
[/quote]
Maybe we used 95. All I know is it was explained to me that way by someone back then, and it most certainly gave more than a half page increase after like the 2 page mark. I haven't tried the trick since middle school, I often found myself typing much more than was required when I did essays for high school, so I wasn't aware they had fixed the glitch/bug/whatever caused it.
[/quote]

It still works, I fooled around with it after I heard the rumor in school just last year.

[A. Crow]

yeah, the period trick is not for large gains.  But in situations where you have to completely fill that 15th page, or get a lower grade ( I actually had a physics paper that was graded by length, I got a 14.5/15 because I didn't completely fill the fucking last page.  The lesson we were supposed to garner from this was "You will be required to do stupid and pointless shit in the real world, get used to it").

[SBCrystal]

I know that this is kind of on topic, since it got off topic...er...but yes, that's why I love the English language: it is always evolving and changing.

For example: when writing essays more and more people are using "their" as a pronoun to be politically correct when they don't know the gender of the author being cited, when the 'proper' way to do this is to refer to the author (male or female) in the masculine form. Soon, simply because of the way society is becoming more PC, this will no longer be the case and using "their" will be the new way of doing things.

One of my biggest pet peeves is not having the option for Canadian English with most programs. Canadian English is a mix of British and "American" English, but no one seems to understand this. Personally, when met with no other option, I choose the British version anyway.

</end moronic ramblings about her favourite thing in the world>

[Surf314]

I had a teacher on a crusade against the exclamation mark.  To be honest it is the most useless of all punctuation marks.  If not for the internet it probably would have died by now.

[CaffeinePowered]

I had a teacher on a crusade against the exclamation mark.  To be honest it is the most useless of all punctuation marks.  If not for the internet it probably would have died by now.

It has plenty of use in fiction....

[Surf314]

[quote author=Surf314 link=topic=2904.msg84148#msg84148 date=1242755622]
I had a teacher on a crusade against the exclamation mark.  To be honest it is the most useless of all punctuation marks.  If not for the internet it probably would have died by now.

It has plenty of use in fiction....
[/quote]

I think the idea was if you can't express the idea behind the exclamation point in your writing you are doing it wrong.  Plus it seems like it does a terrible job of doing what it is supposed to.  You don't get to it till the end of the sentence and then you have to retro-actively add the emphasis to what you just read which doesn't have much of an impact at least for me.  I think the spanish may have it right adding the question and exclamation marks to the beginning and end of sentences, then you can read it in the proper tone.  To me it seems that the exclamation mark is self serving to the person writing it (I am guilty of this too).

On the internet though it is given new life since it is used to help convey the mood of the person writing, so it doesn't matter as much that it is at the end of the sentence or that it's not really changing the way you are thinking about the sentence it is at the back of.  You see it and you think this person is in an excited mood.  The number of exclamation marks help gauge how excited they are.

[SBCrystal]

The Silent Scream: The Exclamation Point (!)

The exclamation point is like the horn of your car -- use it only when you have to. A chorus of exclamation points says two things about your writing: First, you're not confident that what you're saying is important...Second, you don't know a really startling idea when you see one.

...keep your voice down

- Woe is I by Patricia T. O'Conner