When I was about ten years old my father gave me a birthday or Christmas present – I can’t remember which – (please note these parentheses are em dashes and not hyphens…hold that thought and see below) of an ancient Barlock office typewriter which was being dumped from the Chief Constable’s Office in Glasgow Police HQ, and which he got for £1. It was the best present I have ever received. I remember it weighed a ton. The roller round which you secured the paper upon which to type resembled a gun carriage. As you typed, the impending end of the line was signalled by the ping of a bell, and you grasped with the left hand a chromium lever resembling the tremolo arm of an electric guitar, hauled the gun carriage back, and started a new line. It’s all immortalised in a piece of light music, a kind of concerto for typewriter by Leroy Anderson which was performed by Bill Bailey at last year’s Last Night of the Proms. I suppose to anybody born this millennium it would have been quite incomprehensible. I loved my Barlock, and got pretty fast, though I lacked the discipline to learn to touch type. Sadie, a friend of my aunt, who I think was in the typing pool of Wills’ the cigarette manufacturer, gave me a few tips. For example, you could create an exclamation mark (not available then on the QWERTY keyboard) by typing an apostrophe, then back-spacing, and typing a full stop under the apostrophe. And always remember, said Sadie, to leave a double space after each full stop. See. I just did it.
The trouble is, the post period double space convention has gone. I’m not sure when it fell out of favour, but it was long after I moved on the Barlock and replaced it with a more nimble Lettera 22, akin to moving from a desk top to a laptop, you might say. I still have the Lettera 22. Then came electric typewriters, word processors, and eventually, personal computers. I think it was computers, or IT generally, that didn’t like two spaces after a period. But I persist, through a lifetime’s habit.
I’m currently preparing a 75,000 word MS for a putative publisher, and I note that in their guidelines for submission, they ask for, nay insist upon, the single space convention. I thought, am I going to trawl my way through 75,000 words deleting a space after every sentence? Of course there must be an automatic way of doing it. I interrogated the computer.
Can I change double space to single space after a full stop throughout an entire document?
Yes, you can, using the Find and Replace feature.
1. Open your document in Word.
2. Press Ctrl + H…
Etc.
It hasn’t worked. At least not yet. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. It is both the blessing and the curse of electronic word processing systems that editing and reediting can be so easy. You can carry on tinkering forever, inserting a comma, and taking it out again. But I shouldn’t complain. The modern keyboard offers so many different options. For example there is the umlaut option. Where would I be if I could not use such amalgams as Vergangenheitsbewältingung, or Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl? These household words. So I will grit my teeth and expunge that redundant post-period space. There. Do you suppose that looks okay? The trouble is, there are other conventions to which I must adhere; for example, single and not double quote marks; paragraph indents created by paragraph options and not the space bar; differentiating hyphens and em dashes; double-spaced and not single-spaced lines of course. Didn’t Winston bite the head off of some young lady who was “taking down”? I seem to recall it was immortalised in film by Gary Oldman and Lily James. Darkest Hour. What else? Three dots per ellipsis, without spaces; and a host of other conventions so prolix I will not weary you. You may have noticed I have reverted to the double space. Old dog, new tricks.
This fastidious attention to detail is not peculiar to the publishing world. For about a decade now I have been unable to kick start my annual tax return simply by dropping by my accountant’s office with the written information and supporting documents; I must load it all on to an electronic system, access to which is achieved by utilising a series of passwords, PINS, and time-limited security numbers sent to my mobile. In addition to all this, in order to communicate with my overseas bank, I need an App. It might be easier to enter a high security penitentiary.
All of this takes time. Like everybody else, I have my own highly original theory as to why, these days, in this Brave New World, “nothing works”. It is because we are all grappling, not with a creative task, but with all these electronic conventions, under the illusion that we are doing something useful. My experience is that when things actually do “work”, it is often because all the white noise emanating from the machinery that controls our lives is being quietly ignored by a compassionate human being. I recently had cause to visit my GP with a minor ailment. It was an encounter that might have taken place fifty years ago. An exchange of courtesies; a history elicited; a few questions of clarification; an examination; a diagnosis; a treatment; and even, God bless him, an open ended question: is there anything else I can do for you today? And all of this without a computer in sight.
jamescalumcampbell 