Inner space

(Remember when Meg Ryan was cute, instead of a bio-engineering experiment? Actually, this 1987 rendering already makes her look a little bio-engineerish, a portent of Restylane to come. But I digress.)

When your production-editor cap is on, you look for all kinds of spacing problems in your documents. For me, the easiest ones to see lie inside the text block: those random extra spaces between words or sentences.

I see these quickly, a facility a design director I knew once described as "scary." I just glance down, and, before I even look, there they are, like they're circled in fluorescent orange. Big as Ike.

No surprise, then, that I really hate to see these spaces make it through to a final piece. If they were something I struggled to see, I'd be a lot more forgiving, I'm sure.

Last year, I went to a fine-arts gallery at a well-known liberal-arts college. It was my first visit. The exhibitions were pretty interesting. I had heard from someone employed at the college that the curators were very proud of their sensibilities and very resistant to any creative input from elsewhere at the college, including the editorial staff in the communications office.

Therefore, I was surprised, but not surprised, to see the gallery's item labels weren't particularly well-written. Insularity can do that. And the extra spaces . . . oh, the humanity. So numerous, so painful. In big easy-to-read display type, no less.

I left thinking, well, that's a cute collection. Instead of thinking, what a fine collection; it does this college proud.

Professional accomplishment depends on getting detail after detail right, especially where language and editorial design are concerned. Leave unnecessary spaces you can drive a truck through on a bunch of item labels, and your attentiveness to responsibilities less easily "seen"—the thoroughness of your research, your historical analysis—is immediately called into question.

So, whenever possible, just miniaturize me and Dennis Quaid, slap us in a little miniature submarine thingie, and we'll swim through the "body" of your material and zap these inner spaces away. Singing "Twistin' the Night Away."

Or just look for and zap them yourself. ("Twistin' the Night Away" optional.)