I much prefer two spaces after a sentence. Why that new idiotic single spaced rule came about I have no idea, nor why people think it makes them a better writer when all it means is they still couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag but they do so with one less space after a period. There isn’t a single punctuation or spacing rule that improves writing, period, double spaced. If you want to be a writer quit worrying about punctuation or grammar rules or proper spelling. You can learn that later. First learn to write. And you don’t learn to write obsessing over which rules are in vogue at the moment. You learn to write by putting your thoughts into sentences that other people will like to read.

I hate language rules. I fucking hate them.

You know, I graduated high school with a summa cum laude in English. I’d forgotten all about that for thirty years till I found the certificate in some of mom’s papers, like I’d left it somewhere and quickly suppressed the memory. But I remembered being called into the English office and wondering what the fuck I could’ve done to get in trouble in the English department and there were all these nice teachers looking at me. They told me I’d been awarded the summa cum laude in English. I had no idea what summa cum laude meant. They told me. I must have looked confused because to be honest I hated English classes. I despised the grammar rules and the old poetry. I only took the goddamn things because they were easy, I could bullshit anything on an essay test and never do any of the homework. I think I took every one they had. I just had to show up, write the occasional essay and ace the class. It was that easy. If you’re kind of a natural at writing you learn that trick quick. I was an autodidact anyway, voraciously reading big, thick, dense books I’d get at the public library and studying my beloved set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which I still have, actually. I was reading the histories my dad would get from the Book of the Month Club when I was still in grade school, some of which I also still have. I read all three volumes of Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer winning Army of the Potomac trilogy while in fifth grade, pronouncing Potomac like Fotomat. I’d nearly drowned in the damn thing back in first grade and I still couldn’t pronounce it. And here they were seven grades later still trying to teach me grammar as if language were built on rules like the Ten Commandments and all you have to do is memorize them. Yeah, right. I’d be damned if I wasted my adolescence with their silly assed grammar instruction. I never told them that, though. I was always very nice. Pleasant, even. So they give me a fucking award on my way out the door.

That probably came under irony in the text book.