Same here, except that I learned to type (poorly) in the 70s. Maybe I never got the email banning this. At this point they are going to have to pry the double-space out of my cold-dead fingers.
This is the first time I have ever heard that double spacing was not the norm. That’s how I was taught to type in junior high and I have been double spacing ever since.
Another daily typist who just thinks double spaces look better. Well aware that the current trend/preference was single. But I’m not sure why anyone would get too worked up about it one way or the other.
Sheesh, next thing you know people will question whether punctuation is supposed to go inside or outside of the quotation marks/parentheses… :rolleyes:
Neither here nor there, but I’m a lawyer, and am well aware of citation and punctuation conventions. But I never bothered myself too much to comply too stringently with those. As with the Pirates’ Code, I consider them more along the lines of recommendations … 
Well, I guess that’s the answer to the OP’s question. A lot of us were taught two spaces, and some of those people are teachers/instructors/professors, and they go on to teach their students two spaces.
Who knows, maybe in time everyone will learn one space. But I think that won’t happen for a long time.
Likewise. I’m well aware that this board removes the second space, so I’ve never bothered to retrain myself. In other situations, I find that a single space makes the sentence break almost vanish, which makes comprehension a bit difficult.
As for why, I initially tried to learn to type through a book my mother has (with a typewriter with a slightly different layout–never quite got it). That book had the two-space rule in it, and being quite young at the time it kind of stuck. When I really learned to type later, it was on old software–how sad is it to be using Win 3.1 in 2000?–so I think it kept that same standard.
I’m one of the hordes of unfortunates who learned to type in the 80s, and it’s difficult to undo 20+ years of training and practice. It’s almost never been an issue, really. The only time it ever came up was recently when I was doing final production on my book manuscript (yay!) for an academic publisher, and their style sheet required a single space after each period. But it was easy to do find/replace in MS Word, and have it replace each period-space-space with period-space.
Not true. I work with a whole lot of people who notice immediately if only one space follows a period. Every time, in every font. And it is visible – the second space nicely separates sentences; modern proportional fonts put the sentences so close together it’s like the space between words, and it looks crowded.
People like the two spaces because we can see them and they help.
I agree with Sailboat on this. I do a lot of proofreading of briefs and memos, and I always notice when there aren’t two spaces at the end of the sentence. I also notice when there are two spaces improperly inserted between two words in a sentence.
If people can tell the difference, then word processing has not eliminated the issue.
I agree with you on this one. I actually thought the double space after a period was still correct until I read this thread. The fact that I’ve never noticed that most people don’t do it, and conversely that no one has ever said anything to me about doing it, indicates it’s probably not that big a deal.
Incidentally, I believe it was only Infocom text adventure games that supported this feature, along with many other niceties. The input engines of Infocom’s rivals, in general, could only recognize short and crude commands conforming to a very rigid word order, and periods or punctuation marks of any kind were not normally meaningful at all.
Oh yes, the thread topic. Put me down as another supporter for typing two spaces after the ends of sentences. Not only is that the way I learned it 25 years ago, it just looks better that way, even in proportional typefaces.
Having said that, it’s just a mild preference. I can’t get as worked up as the OP and a few others here are about this issue. Given all the sloppy writing out there in the world (with lots of confusion about “lose” and “loose” for example, and many other errors that make you stop and re-parse), I’m pleased as punch when sentences are well composed, regardless of how those sentences are separated from one another on the page.
Well, I still maintain that two spaces after a period looks like a gap. And then when you take a step back and glance at the paper, you can really see these white gaps jump out at you. Some people might like this (apparently most people, according to this thread), but I prefer the other. I’m willing to admit I’m in the minority.
Oh, don’t even get me started!
I took “Computers 1” (aka “Typing”) in the late 90s and we were taught to do two spaces after a sentence. Seeing as I “zen” type (I can’t actually think about the words or how they’re spelled or what my fingers are doing or they mess up) and am over 100 WPM, double tapping the spacebar doesn’t slow me down and it’s just automatic. Trying to correct the double space into a single space would slow me down far more.
Just to test, I tried to single space and yep, it messed me up. 
Because we were taught it was proper form in typing class. It also looks better IMV.
It just seems that to use double spaces in this fashion is to mix content with layout, something that may have been OK in the age of the typewriter, but that we’re moving away from these days, when we expect text to searched and indexed and generally processed by computers. Typographical instructions mixed in with actual content are awkward and difficult to handle. It’s better to separate the bare textual content from any concerns about layout and readability. Ideally leave it to the software to automatically insert wider spaces between sentences than between words. By inserting semantically meaningless extra spaces in the base text, you screw all that up.
Considering the crap that goes for writing these days, especially with news sites, and we need all the clarity that we can!
No, the board does not remove double spaces. HTML doesn’t recognize double spaces unless you hard-code in the extra space(s).
There’s the MLA that lays down The Rules for style. In one sense, yeah, it’s useful to have certain conventions that everyone follows. In another sense, it’s damned annoying to have been taught one convention, and then the organization decides that another convention is better. This is what happened with the one space or two rule. Unless you are taking keyboarding lessons, or some other written language course, you’re unlikely to know the current approved style.
I played a few of Scott Adams’ Adventure games, because that’s all that were available for the TI994/A, but once I got a C128 and tried Infocom, there was no going back. The commands I quoted, BTW, were the starting commands from Beyond Zork, which had very primitive graphics as well as text. Infocom could really make fantastic text games, and there were no true rivals in the field. I could have done without the mazes, though.
Oh don’t get me wrong: I notice it. I notice it hard. In fact, I get twitchy nowadays when I spot single spaces after sentences. But that doesn’t mean word processing has not eliminated the problem.* For a certain value of “problem.”
My understanding is that the practice arose not as a method for setting out individual sentences, but as a method for dealing with some peculiarity of printing technology. I don’t have a cite for this, and if someone wants to fight my ignorance here, I’ll happily learn, but I once read that some vagary of typesetting, or perhaps even early typewriters, caused a problem with periods, and the solution was the double-space. We no longer use typewriters or block printing, so the original purpose for the rule no longer exists. The fact that it also makes sentences look nice is just a fringe benefit.
Lynn, I knew I recognized those commands! Did you know you can call it “club” and the game will parse it correctly? Saves you the trouble of trying to spell [del]shileilegh[/del] [del]shelaleigh[/del] shillelagh.
*Try untangling all those negatives!
My now-60-something aunt was a career secretary, so typing was her life. She learned to type in the early '60s. When she first got a home computer and started doing e-mail, everything I got from her had two spaces after periods. However, she apparently learned that that was no longer necessary, and changed her habit easily enough, despite it being ingrained for nearly 40 years.
I was also going to say what Walloon said:
This is a small point, but back when double spaces between sentences were the norm, a period with a single space after it meant one thing only – an abbreviated word (e.g., “Mr.”) within a sentence. So now, when I’m reading text with single spaces between sentences, every time I come to the final word in a sentence, there’s a little part of my brain that thinks it’s an abbreviation, and it’s disconcerting. I have to quash that reflex that says “it’s an abbreviation and the sentence is continuing”, and say to myself, “No, that was actually the end of the sentence, and a new one is starting.” (I’m exaggerating – I’ve gotten used to the single spaces so it’s barely noticeable now. But I’m still more comfortable with double spaces.)
Also, I can be bitten. I am 48 years old. I did not know it was passe’ until this thread!