I saw an article today (safe for work) which talked about how it became standard back in ye olde typsetting days to have two spaces after the end of a sentence, and how a “new study” says we should go back to it. I didn’t realize single-spacing was ‘a thing.’
I write a lot for work. I’m a die hard double-spacer. And I use semicolons on long-running inclusive sentences. And I use the Oxford comma.
Am I a holdout?
Tripler
I refuse to type “RTFM” or “ROTFL” in a technical publication.
I learned double spacing and then heard it was all wrong, and decent folk use a single. So I trained myself to do that. If it changes again I may stock buckets for people to soak their heads in.
Two spaces, and fuck all the times I’ve cut and pasted something, only to lose my two spaces and having to edit them back in. One space does not provide the correct visual cue that the sentence has ended.
I heard of older people doing the two space thing when I was in high school but I never did and neither did any of my classmates. I graduated in 1991. I don’t understand the point especially with modern word processors. I personally think it is an archaic custom and I know that it isn’t generally taught anymore.
The new study is full of shit and was done on monospaced fonts which nobody ever said should be single spaced, anyway. (OK, I’m sure somebody said it, but the “rule” was two spaces after a period for monospaced fonts and one for proportionally spaced fonts.)
As for me, I do one space, unless I’m on a typewriter (which is never these days) or typing in a font like Courier or American Typewriter.
ETA: And, yes, I learned two spaces in typing class and all that jazz, and quickly went to one space on computer word processors with proportionally spaced fonts. And, besides, two spaces here get edited out, so what’s the point?
I learned 2-space in eighth grade, and am too lazy to train myself into a different habit, and also too lazy to care about the science or etiquette or kerning or chestpuffery of it all.
Double spaces. I learned touch typing on a manual typewriter in high school, in 1983, and two spaces was the rule that was drummed into our heads. It’s been muscle memory for me ever since.
Once I realized that literally every book I have ever read uses one space and it is the typographically correct standard, I started using 1 space to make my writing look more professional. It is usually easy to fix in documents, global search and replace for 2 spaces-unless the original author uses spaces instead of tabs. At that point it is usually easier to just throw the draft in the trash and start over.
Yes. I assume you are probably on the younger side of the board, like under, I dunno, about 38 or so. Back in the world of typewriters, we were taught to make two spaces after a period, because with typewriters, all the letters took up exactly the same width, so making two spaces after a period helped to break the flow and separate the sentences. With modern word processing and computers, this is unnecessary, as letter widths and spacing are proportional and a space after a period is enough to separate the sentences. And, as I said before, in many cases, double spaces after a period are ignored by software. Like here, for instance. <-Right there I left ten spaces. It renders as one. Or:
Following this is one space. One space.
Following this is two spaces. Two spaces.
Following this is six spaces. Six spaces.
Following this is eighteen spaces. Eighteen spaces.
They all render as one, unless you use the [noparse]
tag[/noparse]. In which case, it goes into a monospaced font, anyway.
No, it was not standard back in ye old typesetting days to put in two spaces. First of all, what went after a period was a fixed space, intended to be perhaps different than the variable space between the other words but in any case no smaller.
In typing, as opposed to typesetting, people were taught to use two spaces after a period, and a lot of them continue to do it to this day.
Working as an editor, I would see two spaces on the typed page, but it was always one space when typeset. Early photo-typesetters would, if you put in two spaces, often start a line with a space, which is pretty much a no-no. And then they started just automatically deleting one of the spaces, if the typesetter put in two.
I’m now doing work for people who prefer two spaces after a period “for readability” and at the same time doing editing, now onscreen editing, where the first thing I have to do is take out all the extra spaces.
