Freelancing, Word styles, Bill Clinton, and Russia: Articles worth reading

Here are some good reads on an assortment of topics:

• Freelancing tips from an illustrator. It’s obvious that Megan Jeffrey has 17 years of experience freelancing; there’s not a single suggestion with which I’d disagree (link via Lifehacker).
• Macworld: Save time with Word’s styles. One of the biggest ways to make publishing a document more efficient is to get everyone in an organization using Word’s styles. It makes an editor’s job easier, as he or she won’t have to waste time reformatting a document and instead can focus on improving the text.
• The New Yorker: “The Wanderer”—The ex-presidency of Bill Clinton. This article in the September 18, 2006 issue isn’t available online, but it’s worth picking up at the newsstand. David Remnick’s profile of President Clinton is fascinating and examines his work fighting HIV/AIDS.
• The Economist: Russian health and demography—A sickness of the soul. It’s hard to think of a country that put the first man in space as having problems usually reserved for developing nations in Africa and Asia, but that’s what former superpower Russia is facing.

Should there be one space or two spaces between sentences?

One of the most frequent questions and problems I encounter is the number of spaces in between sentences (I see it wrong more often than I see it right). The answer? One space.

Why the confusion? From About.com:

It is generally accepted that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence is a carryover from the days of typewriters with monospaced typefaces. Two spaces, it was believed, made it easier to see where one sentence ended and the next began. Most typeset text, both before and after the typewriter, used a single space.

But if you’re editing a document by someone accustomed to the old style, you don’t need to manually delete each extra space if you use Microsoft Word (instructions are based on Microsoft Word X for Mac, but are similar for other versions):

1. Type Command+F (Ctrl+F for PC versions of Word)
2. Select Replace
3. In “Find what” type two blank spaces
4. In “Replace with” type one blank space
5. Select Replace All
6. Repeat step 5 until Word says it made 0 replacements