I have an old laptop, with a really sticky thumb pad and clickers, and this is a regular problem. However, I do have spell check, and my spell check does not catch this kind of stuff. I am thinking what I need is grammar check, which I have had with other programs, but I am running Open Office now, and that didn't come with.

Does anyone know of an Open Office compatible grammar check I could download?

thanks. and yes, I know I spelled grammar wrong in the subject line, but can't get it back to fix. ARRGH!

Unless you are submitting a story to be published directly from a file, I don't think an extra space here and there will make that much difference. I don't like or trust grammar checkers -- they are wrong too often.

[This message has been edited by debhoag (edited September 16, 2007).]

Done!

The grammar check feature in Word can be a bear, but you have to configure it before it helps at all. After leaving it on for years, I can usually put a story together without ever seeing squiggly green lines anywhere. The red lines are another matter.

The main rule for grammar checks is to figure out why they are flagging that rule, and then decide whether it is something that can be ignored for the type of writing you are doing.

What I figured out is that one should use several of these grammar checks if possible, bouncing the document off each other until there is a sort of agreement.
They will find your dummest mistakes quickly.
For me, my best final grammar check is to read the piece out loud to someone. If you trip over a sentance, even if you read it right the second time, flag it. It needs work because it says something in the wrong way. Your voice and the other person's ears will find the errors no grammar check will ever notice.

I strongly prefer Arial for my work and find that I don't have trouble noticing things like double spaces when in Arial. It's a proportional font, though, so the letter "l" takes up less space than the letter "p" and therefore it's not appropriate for story submissions. Sigh. Courier is such a messy looking font.

My only other contribution to this thread is that I use grammar check on Word as a general rule (it's turned on like spellcheck so that it runs automatically on my documents while I work) and find that it catches a few important things, but mostly I ignore it like Spaceman said.

Here is an (otherwise?) good manuscript format article that contradicts this. In it, he gets right snippy about the two-space controversy:

"Always place two spaces after any sentence-ending punctuation. 'Always?' you ask. Always!"

Thus, in the old days, two spaces broke sentences up a little nicer, making a manuscript easier to read, but it was no longer necessary once computers and more advanced typewriters arrived.

Sadly, the habit is still ingrained for many folks, and some people get rather feisty about it--as the above example indicates.

In any kind of electronic format, it's just useless and pointless.

However, monospaced fonts are ... monospaced. They don't kearn, in other words. Thus, the Courier 10 or 12 we use for manuscripts looks like the old style manuscripts.

So the important question is what do we use when we submit? If we're submitting in monospaced font, should we still double-space?

James D. Macdonald said either way, no one will care.

Edit: I went to the SFWA website to check their comments on this and it wasn't even referred to that I could find although they give pretty complete ms formatting guidelines. One amusing point is that one of their articles on the subject says to make your title in all caps and the other says to never do that.

As I understand it, you are lumping pair kerning and proportional typefaces together, but they are different concepts.

An un-kerned proportional typeface will have narrower spaces allocated to narrower glyphs, but each glyph is treated as an immutable rectangle; an 'I' is exactly one width, an 'A' is another, and a 'W' is another. But every 'I' is given exactly the same width on the page. Likewise every 'A' or 'W'.

Kerning is something different. It takes into account that glyphs are not rectangular, and that spacing them as if they were looks awkward. So it squeezes characters together so that, depending upon their shapes, an aesthetically-pleasing notional distance exists between them. Thus the "AW" digraph will be squeezed, as you describe, but "IA" and "WI"cannot be, so "IAW" will be rendered in less space than "AIW".

Pair kerning could be done with a fixed-width typeface, although that would rather defeat the purpose of using such a face, so it is generally not done.

For the record, I'm unable to type an end-of-sentence period, or a colon, without reflexively pressing the space bar twice.

I see much fervency dedicated to deprecating this practice, pointing out that it's no longer necessary. But is there harm in it? Simply because something is not necessary is not de facto evidence that it is harmful and must be avoided.

quote:

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As I understand it, you are lumping pair kerning and proportional typefaces together, but they are different concepts.

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Yes, I did. I was going for the simplest explanation with an emphasis on explaining why it used to be required and was now optional.

While they are separate, most every explanation I've seen assumed proportional typeface. In fact, Wikipedia says: "In typography, kerning ... is the process of adjusting letter spacing in a proportional font."

Yes, Wikipedia is informal; so was my explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

Anyway, thanks for the clarification. It's good to be familiar with typesetting in this industry