I can see why this was standard operating procedure back when monospaced fonts were the norm and double-spacing after a period actually added clarity to one’s writing. Now, double-spaces after periods are a distraction (to my eyes at least) when used with modern proportional fonts.
I see this sometimes even with people who are too young to have grown up with typewriters. Also, double-spacing after a period requires one extra press on the keyboard.
I still do it. I am completely unaware of doing so as I am typing–in fact, I had to go pull up some recent word documents and look to see if I was still doing it. It was the way I was taught (on early word-processing software, by people used to using typewriters) and it would be really hard to stop. Is it really annoying to most people? I can’t even see it.
I am pretty sure this board removes the double spaces, does it not?
But its doesn’t slow down my typing much - which is around 80 wpm. Its a habit - I did learn to type long before computers and word processors were standard equipment. I also took shorthand - and typed up steno notes on an IBM Selectric at a few secretarial jobs.
Changing the habit is a pain in the back end after almost thirty years of doing it this way. I do change for certain types of work (presentations, layouts). I don’t change for casual communication.
If you have been touch-typing for as many years as I have it would take you a lot longer to type if you had to change that habit. (Hitting the space bar twice is a lot quicker than hitting the brain once!) I guess you could do search-and-replace to get rid of those double-spaces, but why? Some software like this board fixes it and really who cares? In what way is it a distraction?
A better question would be, why are people still acquiring this habit? It’s not that big a deal, and if you’ve been typing for 30 years, you get a pass. But a lot of my students also do this, people who were born in 1990 or 1991! Why are they still being taught to do this?
I still do it. I also still indent with paragraphs if I am doing long emails, or documents. Old fashioned, but I also learned to type on MANUAL TYPEWRITERS. I remember learing to centre things by putting the carriage in the middle and backspacing while counting in my head Capital T, I, T, L, E. then typing.
Title
Or to make it “flashy”
(T- space, space-space, I-space, space-space, T-space, space-space, L-space, space, space E)
T I T L E
So, really, yeah a lot of us geezers use the double-space at the end of the paragraph. Lots of programmes parse these out. (As Manda JO said.) Besides scary Mrs McMuldroch will try to detention me if I don’t.
It’s annoying when you copy and pase something typed in the old way, and you care about consistency in your document. Usually easy enough to search & replace all the double spaces, though. I reserve my ire for the really old-school typists who use multiple spaces for vertical alignment. Grrr.
This is the sort of thing you fight about on the editorial board of your academic journal.
It’s a practice made obsolete by modern word processing, and I pointed this out to the executive board at great length when I joined my journal. (“You people are mad! Mad! The two-spaces rule, and full justification? Such hubris would bring low the very gods!”) But the style guide they used for our publication mandated the two-spaces-after-periods rule. So now, after a year of working on articles following the rule, anything else looks weird. I had big plans to campaign to get on the executive board and strike down this ridiculous rule, but now that I’ve made it I don’t think I can do it. I was so naïve in those heady first days on the journal: I thought I could change the system. But in the end, I just became the system.
Exactly! That’s what I’m after, here. I’ll brush it off for people who learned to type on typewriters, or learned to type on word processors in the very early days of word processing, when it was probably still appropriate to double space after periods. But for young people to do this??
I’ve never noticed it on this board, so it probably removes double spaces. I wouldn’t call it annoying, but seeing a double space after a period is an eyesore to me.
Perhaps because the people who taught them learned it that way and taught it without thinking about it? I learned to type partly on computers and partly on keyboards, around the early to mid 1980s. And I was told that was correct. I didn’t know things had changed!
I learned to type in 1971. No way I’ll be able to retrain.
Spent the first 30 years of my life putting double spaces after periods. Personally, it doesn’t bother me either way, I just have a habit of doing it one way because of early training.
I suspect some younger folks are learning because of old farts who are unable to change, as opposed to old farts such as myself who don’t really care if the standards change, and the Unchangeable Ones are brow beating younger folks into doing it the old fashioned way, at least in some cases.
I learned to double space after a period when I was four, and that’s how I’m going to keep doing it. When somebody told me (just last year!) that we weren’t doing it that way anymore, I told them to bite me. Two spaces after a period (or a colon, as I recall) is normal, in my opinion. For the record, I’m 23.
I like it better that way. It looks better to me. Maybe I’m just too old.
Besides learning to double space, and centre like my mother and then Mrs McMuldroch taught me, I had a history teacher who made us learn chapter and verse the style of Scholarly Reporting in the Humanities
I still have my copy I had to buy in Grade 13.
I wan’t those kids (and the snow) off my lawn.
I do it because that’s what I was taught when I was first learning to write. I’m pretty sure it was sometime around third or fourth grade, the first time we were expected to type something up for school, so that would have been sometime in the mid-nineties/ We were told that you put two spaces instead of one after a period, and up until this thread I have never thought to wonder why.
Doing anything else looks wrong to me.
Anyone have any data on what year it changed in some of the main style guides? It hasn’t been that recently. MLA apparently still accepts 2 spaces. And it’s not like anyone typically goes out into the workforce and announces these changes to people out of school, unless they work in publishing.
Yep, I’m 21 and I learned to do that in elementary school. It just looks cleaner in my mind, though I likely won’t notice if someone else doesn’t do it. Consistency is more important that anything else here, I suspect.
You win the thread!
(And, yes, I’m gonna steal this line for my email sigs.)