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Hi Dick,
To help me understand, if there was a sentence like: ” They left the roomJames then felt so much more comfortable.” I would have thought inserting a period would introduce both the period and space that comes after it and only a period would be needed. Is that not correct?
If it is then why is it different when the next character is a piece of punctuation, in this case, double quotation marks?
Does it depend on the competence expected of the typesetter?
Thanks
John
Hi John,
No, you need to show the space after the period because it is an error. You should not assume that the typesetter will realize this. He or she might well but that is not the point. Your job is to mark up the errors. Whatever character comes next, a capital letter, quotation mark, speech marks, etc., makes no difference. You need to show the space if it is not there originally and should be there.
It is unlikely to be a major issue in most cases but what if the words involved were foreign or unusual, or numerals and calculations and formulae? While you don’t want to overload the typesetter, who might not be the writer, you do need clarity. It’s less likely to be an issue if it’s a missing word as that sort of error is more prominent but missing punctuation and incorrect spacing are more likely to slip through.
Besides, even if the client does spot that a space is also needed you want them to know that you have also seen the error and corrected it.
Hi again Dick,
I have been giving some thought to what you said and it leads me to two inconsistencies that we already accept.
I think, as you rightly say, there are many contexts and as students, your intent is to make sure we recognise all errors. Leaving no space is an error but the context is a piece of English prose and in prose, a period is always (I think) followed by a space.
But when we add a letter to a word, say an ‘e’ to ‘passag’, the ‘e’ takes up the space between the words. However, we don’t need a second mark to introduce ‘more space’. Also when deleting a letter at the end of a word we don’t need a second mark to say ‘less space’ between that word and the next. Why? We expect it to be assumed the space will be removed. The same applies to inserting a letter or deleting a letter in the middle of a word. In the first case we don’t need to say ‘more space’ for the letter, but if we delete a letter we do, for some reason, have to say ‘close up’ as well, so using two marks in order to get rid of the space.
Just food for thought,
Kind regards, John
John,
One final comment about your last comment. There is likely to be a degree of variation in how proofreaders mark up extra letters in the middle of a word, for example, as well as human error by not always using the close up as well as the delete. The main point re the original query is to indicate that if there were two errors in the original, not one, then both should be indicated and corrected.
If you are correcting on screen then this is unlikely to be an issue as you will, I am sure, correctly space any insertions or deletions.
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