Brain of Dane

The other day, I heard that the infamous ‘they’ took the double-space-after-a-period rule out of our grammar books.  As mundane a detail as that is, I was devastated.  Ever since my mom taught me to type on the computer, I have been double-spacing.  I’m not entirely sure, but I believe the WordPress WYSIWYG editor takes the double-space out of my paragraphs, yet I still do it as natural as breathing.

Here’s the thing, I’m not too much of a perfectionist when it comes to writing.  Who even knows all of the little rules of our imperfect language?  You would need a reference book to get it all right.  However, I look at writing the same way I look at a lot of things.  There’s a right way to do it, and there’s a wrong way.  When someone puts a rule in front of me like always capitalize at the beginning of a sentence, I stick to that rule because it is universally defined.

Now, let’s get down to the crux of the matter.  Today is the age in which computers are beginning to inundate our everyday communication.  I have heard people say ‘lol’ in conversation, throw out ‘afk’ and ‘brb’.  Heck, I’ve even done a little bit of it myself on occasion (I am a geek, you know).  I just read a great post on snarkmarket about grammar being in flux.  My own sister and wife have both quit capitalizing basically anything.  It’s so much faster to plow through a sentence without having to press [shift] or [shift]+[!].

So then, how do we parse sentences without punctuation?  Are we so worried about the amount of time it takes to write a sentence that we hope our intended reader can understand the data without the container?  How hard is it to read this sentence:

“he said that joe was in the bathroom so i just turned and walked away but then i went outside and joe was waiting for me lol it was funny”

It really isn’t that bad if you put some pauses in there at the right spots.  However, that phrase is under 140 characters.  The problem comes when you write an essay or a blog post or a book.  How do you express tone and color if your readers are constantly trying to figure out where you stop and start?  I’m going to stop there before I get up on a soapbox.

When it comes down to it, the spacing rule after periods has no bearing on how well we can understand each other’s writing.  Originally, typewriters had monospaced characters making it necessary provide an extra space after each sentence for a more defined stop before the next sentence.  Advancements in technology have made double spacing a moot point.  I will fondly remember always double spacing no matter where the grammar rules may lead.  If there was one grammar rule you could not let go of, what would that be?  Better yet, what rules have you always wanted to get rid of?