The space between words is non-deliberate. Even very sensitive writers have no idea whether or not they leave space between the words they write, or whether this space is large or small. When someone drew a well-known musician’s attention to the wide spaces he left between words, he was astonished for he had never before ‘seen’ them. (Tchaikovsky)

The words on paper follow one after the other as they do in speech. A person who speaks with pauses may do so because he is accustomed to pondering, considering and reconsidering before he acts; or because he wants to stress each word of his well-calculated speech and let it sink into his audience's consciousness; or because he does not know what to say, or is overcome with emotion. In short, he may pause after his every word because he is cautious and calculating, or because of a wealth of thought or a lack of it, or because of his depth of feeling. But if the pauses outweigh the importance of the speech, we must conclude that the speaker is conceited, affected, and probably inhibited. The same conclusions must be drawn from wide spaces between written words. If, on the other hand, there is little or no pause between the writer's words, he may be a man of not accustomed to pondering or even loathe doing so; or he may be impulsive and garrulous; or rather superficial and incapable of any introspection. But he is natural, self-confident, and therefore uncritical. Sometimes the space between words may grow to such an extent that it gives the impression of excessive emptiness, whereas well-spaced words reveal the aesthete, the poet, and the musician. Those excessively spaced are indicative rather of the spendthrift and the empty head assuming the pretense of mental profundity. There are those who waste paper and our time quite recklessly: three or four words per line on good-sized letter paper are the best they can do. Pulver calls such writers, prodigals, egotists, and semi-gods; he is convinced that they also are little concerned with other people's rights, that they are very inconsiderate. All the interpretations in the preceding paragraphs are based on the assumption that the unusual spaces between words, wide or narrow, occur regularly. But just as there are writers who space their lines sometimes widely, sometimes narrowly, so there are writers whose words are sometimes widely, sometimes narrowly, spaced. The only conclusion is that such a writer is rather unstable both in his thinking and in his emotions; that he presents sometimes the one, sometimes the other, picture and impression.

A clarifying overview: Spaces between words directly represent the psychic and physical space the writer maintains between himself and others—the willingness to be close or the need to maintain distance. They can be wide and even, extremely wide, narrow and even and narrow and uneven. The Palmer method teaches a specific amount of writing ‘space.’ When one overwrites ‘space that is allotted to him’, he is hiding something.

Page 5 of 7 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | Next