RE: Origin of Ellipsis

From: Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:03:05 -0600

Lots of people still do this. I did until a year or two ago.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell
-----Original Message-----
From: "Stephan Stiller" <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com>
Sent: ‎9/‎13/‎2013 19:30
To: "unicode_at_unicode.org" <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Subject: Re: Origin of Ellipsis
Hi Philippe,
> This means that this dot will then need to be followed by two spaces 
> when it is used as a sentence-ending period.
This tradition is no longer current in the US. Though it's obvious there 
are still plenty of middle and high school–level teachers and 
college-level writing instructors teaching this in the US, not knowing 
that books and periodicals in the US haven't been using two spaces after 
a sentence-final period for a long time. Let's see how many decades 
it'll take for them to forget about this; writing folks who lack an eye 
for common practice can be rather obstinate in insisting on what they 
heard from some authority during their childhood ;-) After all, people 
who should know better still recommend Strunk & White on their websites 
(or CMOS, which is actually pretty good, for the most part), despite 
none of them ever having read these works.
Might also have to do with age-old textbooks for classes in 
touch-typing, though the idea that double sentence spacing makes more 
sense with a monospaced font is questionable at best.
(Of course the question whether double sentence spacing is better in 
principle is different from the question what common practice is.)
Stephan
Received on Fri Sep 13 2013 - 21:05:02 CDT

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