Re: Origin of Ellipsis

On 9/14/2013 3:42 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 14 Sep 2013, at 02:30, Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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 This tradition is no longer current in the US.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.
> Books never used it. The tradition in typing was developed to assist typesetters to navigate the typewritten text they were setting. The typesetters never put two spaces after a full stop.

I see. I think you were mentally mixing this up with double inter-line
spacing. (The ambiguity of "double spacing" is why I disambiguated this
as "double sentence spacing" a couple of times in this thread.)
Incidentally, I never figured out how this is defined: double-///what/?
Double inter-line spacing always looks stupid and decreases the
legibility of a text. It can't be justified, yet somehow there is a
tradition in the US to require it for writing assignments in a
university context. I don't get it. Maybe this is practical for
paper-and-pencil copyediting (this is what CMOS thinks; though I never
heard of such a requirement in Germany), but even for a college-level
writing class you'd need a lot of comments to fill up the margins, and
this requirement doesn't seem to be confined to writing classes or
assignments focusing on writing mechanics. And nowadays you can see
academic (draft and published) papers circulating in
double-(line-)spaced pdf. This makes no sense.

Stephan
Received on Sat Sep 14 2013 - 08:18:35 CDT