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one or two spaces after periods?
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Anonymous
| Office assistant? |
Anonymous
|
I have a secretary as well. Her title is secretary. People have begun to differentiate between office assistant and administrative assistant, but she is neither of these. She is formally a secretary and when she interviewed for the job, she turned in a cover letter seeking "secretarial positions."
Geez, there are some cranky people on here today! BTW, I just asked my sister in law, who is an editor. She said that either one periods or two is acceptable, but one of their publications (a magazine) uses one and their book publishing department uses two. |
Anonymous
Periods or spaces? |
Anonymous
| Good catch but you know what she meant. |
Anonymous
|
There's also some new-fangled thing about putting the punctuation after quotes, not before as I was taught. As in "I want things to remain the same", she said. Drives me nuts, but our editors won't let me do it the old way.
Also, the language gurus seem to keep switching whether you spell out numbers from 1-10, or put the "ordinal."  I just go with the flow on that one, it's an easier habit to break.
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Anonymous
I've noticed that in books published in other countries, you don't see the period and comma within quotes. Has this been a recent change or have we just always done it differently in the United States? |
Anonymous
| It is a pain to deal with multiple authors, and my fingers are always confused. FWIW, if you are using Word, there is a setting for "spaces required between sentences" (tools - options - spelling and grammar - grammar settings). You can choose for it to check the number of spaces -- set to one or two -- for it to look for. When you are done with the doc, you can run a grammar check and it will find places that are not in agreement with your setting (one or two). |
Anonymous
We've always put the periods and commas within quotes. It originated with physical typesetting. I don't know why this was an easier way to print, but it was. I had no clue things had changed. That's very disturbing. Our office still puts them within quotes. |
Anonymous
Actually I came to page 2 of the post and didn't know what she was talking about. I thought the thread changed directions at some point. |
Anonymous
| there are facebook groups devoted to this very topic. |
Anonymous
| Legal secretaries are called secretaries for all those people out there getting offended. They make more money than most "assistants." |
zumbamama
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| The copy editor is correct. MLA styles change over the years. All the writers I work with use double spaces, but we take them out before they go into print. |
Anonymous
| Oooh, that will be a hard habit for me to break. That's good to know about Word doing it for you. |
Anonymous
|
You can either put two or one, depends which standards you are writing to.
It's very easy to change by the way at the end of preparing the document. If you want one space, just find all two spaces with the find function and replace with one space (do: replace all), click "replace all" until it gives you the message that there are none. Same thing if you want two, let it find full stop and one space, replace all with fullstop and two spaces, and then find all with three spaces and replace with two spaces. All this takes less than 2 minutes. Personally, I prefer two spaces. Also, microsoft word spelling and grammar option allows you to choose 1 or 2 spaces after a fullstop, so you can choose the option and it will highlight all those that are otherwise. |
Anonymous
AP Style Manual and Chicago Manual of Style say the same: one space. Together with MLA, these are the three most commonly used style manuals in the United States. One space is basically the rule for everything that is set in a word processing program (though J. Steele is probably right about Courier). |