Party Like a Copywriter fact: Writers always love to talk about writing. Or write about writing.
The great Lee Clow’s Beard Twitter stream aside, Advice to Writers on Twitter has been a great source of writing advice. Some of the bits I’ve enjoyed:
The golden rule of modern word processing:
Use one space after a sentence.
No, really. Unless you’re using a typewriter (which, although awesome, is arguably not terribly modern), there’s no need to insert an extra space after a sentence. At all.
It was standard to use two spaces after a sentence with a typewriter because typewriter fonts aren’t proportional. Because the letters are all the same width, using two spaces makes the document easier to read. With proportional fonts, using two spaces after a sentence makes a large, lonely gap—so documents are more difficult to read. Sentences are social and like to be near each other. Don’t separate.
Copywriters know this, as they have generally spent hours of their lives deleting extra spaces. And it’s tedious, soul-destroying work that wears down the copywriter’s faith in humanity and delete key alike. Please, stop superfluous spacing and spare your copywriter this agony!
Two spaces after a sentence: not a party.
One space after a sentence: raging party.
Our team continues to grow! Meet our new copywriter and Sr. website developer.
Deborah Fellinger, Junior Copywriter
Deborah’s whole life has been one big multichannel writing project. When she was in fourth grade, she created her own print magazine. When she was in college, she wrote a snarky fashion blog. When she graduated from Columbia, she took her journalism skills to Yelp and The Local Beet. Now that she’s joined our creative team, she’s revving up our interactive projects with her wit and writing prowess. And when she’s not writing for us, she’s writing for her own two blogs and tweeting about everything else in between. Prolific much?
Mick Wroblewski, Senior Web Developer
Mick can tackle any interactive programming challenge we throw at him. It’s sort of like adding another superhero to our already inhuman interactive team. Before joining us he worked at an interactive agency in Evanston and developed for apartments.com. Before that, he earned his degree in computer science from the University of Iowa. When Mick’s not schooling us on the finer points of database development, he stays busy schooling his nephews on the finer points of Chicago sports fanaticism. read the full story...
