Years ago, when I was a wee lad in a kindergarten in Flagstaff, Arizona, I learned to form my letters. It’s strange I remember this day in particular when I think about it. There were hundreds of days before and after this memory which remain shrouded in my mind, forgotten. However, this day stands out for some reason. I honestly remember the excitement of forming the lowercase letter “a” on my paper. My stubby fingers wrapped awkwardly around that graphite stick, a tool of great power I was learning to wield, a key that would unlock the world’s secrets to me. As the letter weaved its way into shape in front of me, I recall feeling like I was on the cusp of something mighty and mystical, a skill which beckoned me into a larger world of…important grown-ups, I guess. I dunno, I suppose I didn’t really have an idea of what was to lie on the other side of this skill, yet I knew it was special.
Other letters which stand out in my memory are “y,” “j,” “q,” and “g,” because each of these letters had what my teacher called “monkey tails”, and I loved monkeys. I drew the heck out of those monkey tails. In fact, I kinda went overboard with those letters. The tails tended to be so long that they would drag down into the line below them, often times dropping through another letter like a “t” or an “H,” confusing things to no end. I’m 23 years old now and I still have this problem.
Maybe the reason these few kindergarten lesson stick out in my head is because it was the birth of who I am today: a writing nerd. Growing up, I was a pretty good student, but I did especially well in any class that required writing. Sure, I struggled with the occasional 10-page paper like everyone else did, but I grew to enjoy writing classes much more than my math and science classes. Math and science were so black and white, right or wrong. Writing, however, seemed to thrive in the shades of grey. It’s for this reason I often think of writing as being “alive”, because life has very little to do with black and white and very much to do with what lies between those two poles. There were rules in writing, of course, format, spelling, grammar, but like the Pirate’s Code, these rules were “more like guidelines”. They seemed to act more like the bumpers at a bowling alley, designed to keep you on track and out of the gutter, but that was all.
I also enjoyed the act of typing. My brothers and I spent a lot of time playing computer games with each other, which quickly fostered a familiarity with the keys. In the summer, when we had played games for too long, my mom would take the disc (yes, welcome back to the 90s) out of the computer and put in different ones. What was on these disks? Typing exercise games. My brothers and I left Mavis Beacon in the dust. My typing speed continued to improve in third grade when I started being assigned papers to type for the first time.
By the time I graduated high school, I fancied myself a pretty good writer. In community college, a professor selected me to be a writing tutor after she saw my writing that semester. I spent a year and a half as a software tester at Microsoft where typing was 90% of my job every day, and I was working 12 hour days. The keyboard began to feel like an extension of my body. My first semester at Northwest University boasted six heavy-writing classes, and I got the highest GPA I’ve ever had. I was in my prime, the Lord of Lecture Notes, the Prince of Papers, the Ravager of Reflection Responses, the King of the Keyboard.
And then it happened.
See, I had grown haughty in my language skills. In my public speaking class, I did a presentation on all the reasons you should use the Oxford comma in your writing. I had heated debates with people regarding the leading sound in the word “gif” and the nature of acronyms and their pronunciation in English in 2016 (it’s a hard “g” sound, by the way, like in “gift”…if you think it’s “jif”, come at me). Every time I opened a word document, my muscle memory would kick in and activate my basic settings: Times New Roman, size 12, double-space. I’m going to school to learn to be a high school English teacher, and I took that duty seriously.
So when I bumped into an article titled “Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period”, I found myself torn. I had never thought of that before. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, typers tend to do one of two things once they have finished a sentence; they press the spacebar once after the period, or they press it twice after the period. As a child learning to type, I had been told that you were supposed to type two spaces after a period. It’s simply how things were.
I prepared my argument. It’s to create a visual gap between sentences, it’s the correct way to type, it looks better. But as I mounted my defense against this opposing point of view, I realized how flimsy it was. And as I read the article, the author took those flimsy reasons and thoroughly butchered them, deconstructing them with ease in front of my very eyes. Actually, almost every format guide agrees the one-space is correct and that any more is incorrect. The two-space rule is an artifact of the past when typing was done on typewriters in monospaced fonts, a shortcoming that’s been easily fixed with new technology since the 70's. The only reason you were taught two-space was because your own teacher was taught incorrectly as well. Moreover, nobody really cares or notices if you use one space instead of two, so that’s not reason enough to type incorrectly.
I crumbled under the onslaught. There were still some arguments that could be had, I suppose. Like, one could argue since there s no majorly noticeable visual difference between one-space and two-space, that the two-space could not really be considered “incorrect.” Some could argue writing should be about semantics and not syntax, and therefore the whole argument was pointless. But, I forfeited my right to this opinion years ago when I was crusading the cause of the semicolon to my classmates (“It’s like using a period, but it makes you look smart!”) and proclaiming myself a grammarian.
I found myself at a crossroads. On the table in front of me were two slices of humble pie. If I ate the first piece, I would have to admit using the two-space rule was wrong, and I’d have to start the monumental process of breaking a lifetime of muscle memory and typing habits, forcing myself to hit that spacebar only once after each period. But if I ate the other piece, I would have to admit I was wrong for being a grammar tyrant for so long and submit myself to a lifetime of holding my tongue every time somebody misspelled “your” or pronounced “gif” with that dreadful “J” noise. Two difficult decisions: to grit my teeth through a rocky typing transition for grammar’s sake, or to give up my critical grammarian crusades and join the masses who care little for bickering over tiny grammatical nuances…
And that, my friends, is the story about how I’ve been banging my head against this keyboard for hours trying to shake the two-space rule out of my fingers. What, you didn’t think I would throw in the towel, did you? No, I’ve got a reputation to uphold! I’m the Lord of Legalism, the Sultan of Syntax, the Duke of Debate, the Prince of Papers!
