This week I have two topics for you, the number of spaces after a period at the end of

a sentence, and whether you should use who or that to refer to people and pets.

Now here's our first listener question.

Hi, grammar girl.

I consider myself a bit of a grammarian, but I was floored the other day by something

that some friends of mine were saying.

They were indicating their belief that it is antiquated to use double spaces between

sentences.

Their explanation is that this comes from the days of the typewriter, and it is just no

longer needed when typing on computers.

Their explanation makes sense.

I just couldn't believe that I had not heard this before.

You could speak to this.

That would be great.

Thanks.

Yes, the caller is correct, and he's also right that a lot of people haven't heard about

the change.

Here's the deal.

Most typewriter fonts are what are called mono spaced fonts.

That means every character takes up the same amount of space, and I take up as much

space as an M, for example.

When using a mono spaced font where everything is the same width, it makes sense to type two

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