I’m just about to turn 30 and I’m an inveterate two spacer but pretty much everyone my age is a one spacer and they tend to look at me with two heads on the very rare occasions that it comes up. I assume it was the fault of my grade school keyboarding teachers who were taught to type on typewriters and when computers came along, never thought to question what they had been taught as best practices. I do know I merrily wound my way through high school and college typing two spaces and no one ever batted an eye.
I’m assuming I must have learned double spacing back when I took a high school typing class around that same time. It apparently was a common rule back then.
But I honestly can’t remember being taught this. I single space because it never occurred to me not to single space. If I was ever taught to double space, I had long forgotten it years before I ever owned a computer. It was only a couple of years ago that I heard that double spacing was even a thing that people did.
I sincerely hope nobody ever has to pour one of your documents into InDesign.
And if it was, what would be your answer?
Double space, because I learned to type on daisy wheel typewriters and the like. I know many modern text presentation modes will render the spaces however they like (for example HTML just collapses it down to one space), but I still type two out of deeply ingrained habit.
Some software can be set to disallow repeated spaces. It’s a good feature to activate if you tend to double. (I know Word does it, probably lots of others too.)
Double space after a period or a colon. I don’t stop to think about it one way or the other.
I still use vi for (almost) all my editing and it “knows” to follow a period with two spaces in response to a ‘J(join)’ command. Why would I want to fight vi by using single spaces? (Do those who use vi but prefer single spaces edit away all the double spaces vi has inserted?)
It’s rather irrelevant anyway: Most of my writing is run through html rendering before seen by others. This post is written with double spaces — can anyone see them?
+2
For all those here who think double spaces are ‘correct’, please look up ‘mono spaced alphabets’ to understand why it was standard practice on typewriters, and not standard for typesetting and modern word processing.
Yes. This.
I always use two spaces after before a new sentence and it always looked just right to me but I could never quite explain why. Thanks!
I took typing class around the same time too — mid 1970s. I distinctly remember the teacher telling us to 2-space after sentences.
So I went and quoted pulykamell’s post and sure enough, I see the 10, 2, 6, and 18 spaces in the original, and they’re all rendered as 1 space:
Being 32, I’ve never used a typewriter in anger, but when learning about computers and word processing in school circa 1993, I remember being taught to double space. For years I had Word use this setting, until I read a thread on this board about proportional fonts, since when I have switched to single space. It’s really not a difficult habit to break, IMO.
Single space. I archive stories for folks and one of the first things I do while prepping a doc to upload to my website is remove all double spaces.
I’m a technical writer so I’ll use whatever the style guide I’m following says.
But if I have a choice I use a single space.
Learned double-spacing in typing class in high school in the late 1980s, eventually the habit. I now go with a line break after every sentence.
Two spaces. Just one looks odd to me.
Single space. I’m 37 … guess my teachers were cutting edge!
I was/am a double-spacer and I never bothered to change; if it bugs people so much, they can bloody well edit the document themselves. I like your bucket idea, though.
Another two spacer, and Oxford comma user.
Just like boobs, many things look best in pairs. Double space.