Your Computer Isn’t a Typewriter

photo by valeriana solaris

Guess I’m on a spelling/grammar/punctuation kick this week. I’m sure it will pass.

Way back in the dark ages of the early ’90s, I picked up a little book called The Mac is Not a Typewriter. Along with the dictionary, thesaurus and The Associated Press Stylebook, it has proven to be one of the more valuable reference books on my bookshelf.

Unfortunately it must not be on enough bookshelves. Some of the most basic lessons set forth in this guide to the rules and techniques of professional typesetting are routinely ignored by people whose occupations involve tapping at a computer keyboard eight hours a day. Here are two of my biggest pet peeves:

One period between sentences. Seriously, do you still double-space after the period before starting a new sentence? If you learned typing on a typewriter, you might. On a typewriter the characters are monospaced, which means each takes up the same amount of space and a period requires two spaces to separate sentences. Characters on a computer are proportional, which means each takes up the amount of space appropriate for that character.

The one-space rule also applies to colons, semi-colons, question marks, quotations marks and any other punctuation you might be tempted to follow with two spaces.

Use hyphens, en dashes and em dashes appropriately. I think more people get this wrong than right. There’s a reason all of these symbols are available for your use. The hyphen is used only to hyphenate a word or line break. The en dash is used between words to indicate a duration (thin space before and after). And the em dash is used to to indicate an abrupt change in thought (no spaces before or after).

The Mac is Not a Typewriter has more good information than its 72 pages would suggest. You should seriously consider adding it to your bookshelf.

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Tagged as: editing, grammar, punctuation, style, the mac is not a typewriter