Wow. We’re the same age and we seem to have contrasting viewpoints here. I can’t remember whether or not I was explicitly taught to double space after a period in elementary school. If I were, then at some point along the road I seem to have come to prefer single-spacing after periods.
(slight hijack)
does anybody else remember learning to type the “inverted triangle” on the title page?
Something like:
…This research paper is submitted in partial
…fullfillment of the requirements
… for course number xxx
…December 1971
(Gosh…I had to add all those damn dots in each line, because without ‘em, the software moved everthing to the left margin. Where’s my good ol’ Smith-Corona manual? I sure miss hearing that nice ding at the end of each line.)
well here was one exercise I was taught.
punctuate the following sentence to make sense
No worry no worry worry worry worry
damn I don’t know how to put in spoilers so I will have to come back and make another post
The horror! The horror!
Stranger
It’s not “the board” that removes those extra spaces. It’s your browser, actually. HTML condenses whitespace down to a single space, by design. Just about everything you read in your browser uses single spaces as a result.
In order to fake a double space, you’d need to put in a pair of HTML non-breaking spaces after each period, which is a big pain. I’ve seen some die-hard sites that bother to do that, but not many…
MLA sucked ass, compared to Scholarly Reporting in the Humanities
SRitH was published in a courier-like font, was a saddle stitched paper bound booklet and I you could actually take a ruler and measure things like margins. My grade 13 history teacher was such a stickler I made a back-sheet template for my pages to make sure my margins were perfect.
(And because Im posting in two threads about typing, I bought my computer in my first year of university. It made my life about 10,000 times easier. Oh, for a year we had a smith corona word processor. I loved some parts about it, but mostly I still had to type by hand my History papers, because word processors didn’t handle footnotes very well.)
I do it, but it’s not just out of habit. It seems to make the sentences stand out on their own, and thus make a paragraph easier to read, more so than just a single period.
I don’t understand the hate. It’s not like I’m typing something ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS, or typing Indian-style by adding spaces before the punctuation mark ,with no space afterwards.
If you’re using fully-justified text, the double space should be avoided. If you’re using unjustified text, and especially if you’re using a monospaced font (but even if you’re not), then the double space is still a good idea.
Personally, when I’m writing fiction, I use a plain text editor (simply a matter of the way I’m comfortable working), and I double-space. When the story is finished, it gets converted to HTML, and – as ed points out – any double spacing will be swallowed up by your web browser. (One of the HTML rules is that multiple spaces are always reduced to a single space.)
Well said.
I was taught the double-space method in 1994 in a computer lab full of Macs. I’ve gotten over it, but it’s only fallen out of favor in the last decade or so and it will take longer than that for it to shake out from all the teachers and the students who have already learned it.
No hate, just perplexity.
Grammar Hitler Mrs. Gage made absolutely sure I would never be able to deviate from this practice. Back in the old days when editing websites was still new, some of the editing programs wouldn’t let you do two spaces in a row (it’d just ignore them)… anal ol’ me had to go in and manually change every second space to just to make sure it’d show up. Gah.
And then, years later, when I was forced to write by hand again in college (I had almost forgotten how by this point) I’d have to manually leave a longer space after each sentence because it’d look wrong otherwise. This was on paper!
(I’m 24, started typing when 8 or so)
It’s how I learned to type in high school and I will continue to do it. It’s a habit with me and one space at the end of a sentence looks wrong to me.
I’m 30, we got our first computer when I was about 5 or 6, so I’ve been typing on computers for pretty much my whole life. We had a typewriter when I was very young and I found it delightful, but I didn’t really ever work on one. Anyway, I do it. My dad taught me to when I was a little kid. Just a habit. I don’t notice whether or not someone double spaces or not, so it seems like a bizarre peeve.
I don’t recall if we learned this in middle school (when I first started typing up papers) but I know in my freshman typing class in high school, in 1999, I learned to do double-space. I still do it out of habit, and I’ve yet to be convinced that it makes things harder to read. I’ve tried out doing a replace-all in Word, and it seems to me that it’s a little bit easier to parse with extra spaces. Not that it’s a big deal - obviously, I can read things online without any trouble - but I don’t think it’s objectively better to single-space.
I still capitalize and punctuate my IMs, too.
Dammit I hate when I have to supply the punchlines to my own jokes :mad:
but here we go
(period) No worry (period) no worry ( No period) worry worry worry
okay I’ll get my coat… 
Hah!
I grew up with typewriters, not keyboards, and learned to double space after periods. I still do so, even though it’s edited out online. I think that even with the newer fonts, sentences look better and are easier to read with a double space after a period.
However, the new standards are different, so I’m trying to just live with it. It’s not a big deal.
I did somewhat alter my typing habits when I was playing Zork and similar games. For those who don’t know, text games would allow the user to enter several commands at once, separated by periods. No space was needed after periods. So when I’m confronted with a black screen and white text, I’m likely to enter:
n.w.take weed.e.e.take shillelagh.w.s.take lamp.w.w.take all.w.open door.d.
I didn’t know it had changed. I learned to type in a 1990 high school typing class.
I think one space after a period looks weird. Two spaces = Gestalt.
As others have said: I was taught to do it.
In my old age it isn’t important enough to me to try and break the habit.