So...how many spaces are at the sentence you posted?

idk if I've ever seen this

I don't really care if you put single, double, or hell get spicy and put triple. Just. Be. Consistent. Please, for your typesetter's sake.

It is a very hard habit to break, ngl.

i don’t assume bad things because one of my favorite people online does it. but i do assume people who do it are of a certain age

Mea culpa..

You can have my extra space when you claw it from my cold, dead hands.

I think older people were taught this was the correct way. It's clearly not the standard anymore though. And yet some of them insist on continuing to do it, and I think the inability to adapt with the times suggests habits of mind that are correlated with other irritating beliefs.

It’s correct with monospace typefaces (like on a typewriter) but everything is proportional now and they’ve forgotten why they do it.

Anecdote != data, but my two-space habit is serious muscle memory. Word processors like MSFT and Libre will auto-correct. For plain ascii, some editors will also. For posts, the extra spaces make great reserves if your long post barely exceeds the character limit at draft. Like this one almost did.

hi it me i am 35 but had a very traumatizing legal writing class that still haunts me a decade later despite knowing that it can't hurt me anymore

That’s a really weird thing to project on someone. I still do it because I was taught to in paralegal class and the muscle memory is strong

Well I did say it was irrational. I think it's just because I read way more bad posts with that style than good ones

It's an older-person or older-thinking indicator. While older doesn't imply bad, there are outsized correlations with bad, esp. in some arenas.

Yeah I literally just learned it in typing class and I never heard boo about the one space thing until I had been practicing law for five years and a younger attorney laughed at me for it. Genuinely just had no clue it changed. No one sent a memo you know

It’s just a convention, and conventions are always arbitrary. So as you get older you learn not to sweat that dumb stuff & certainly not judge people for doing a slightly different arbitrary thing than you were trained to do, arbitrarily. It’s all minutiae in the end, who cares, we’re all dead

Learned at the transition point (tend to go 2 on formal docs), tend to have a higher degree of grammar/spelling proscriptivism than not, but on this its live and let live, both standards exist simltaneously

It's just a little easier to read. I personally don't do it out of typing habit muscle memory, but I always appreciate when people do.

If you do two spaces at the end of a sentence, using ctrl f “. “ correctly identifies sentence ends. It also distinguishes between abbreviations and full stops.

This too.

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

It was the standard for typing on typewriters. Might have continued with old fixed width font printers. Modern word processors automatically adjust character spacing, so it’s counter-productive.

The people that insist on it from others are the absolute worst.

I will continue to put two spaces after the ends of sentences unless and until periods can no longer be found anywhere other than at the ends of sentences.

I just sigh, Ctrl-R, and go about my day. (Although I *am* “that” old, it turns out that one can, in fact, learn new things).

I assume they never read "The Mac is Not a Typewriter."

Some of us are ancient and were trained that way in our actual typewriter typing lessons

That doesn’t make you ancient. It makes you a member of the generations that learned to write in the relatively short period between setting type and computers. If you were truly ancient you would understand this. And maybe even be able to operate a Linotype.

look some of us had to start on a reed stylus, pressing cuneiform into river clay tablets

You don’t even have to be that old - I’m 54 and was trained that way in typing class in middle school. Used two spaces for decades, then suddenly whippersnappers are all “OMG I can’t believe you used two spaces after a period!”

I’m slightly younger and that’s just how we learned to type. I have no problem with people switching to one space instead of two, but I’m not realistically going to change 40 years of muscle memory.

I'm 54 and was trained that way in typing class in middle school, but by the time I was in high school, proportional fonts for home printers were becoming common enough that people were already saying two spaces weren't necessary any more, so I stopped using them back then.

I’m 39 and was trained that way. It didn’t die-die that long ago.

>60M and I luv trolling younger colleagues on their two-space habit

Based on the amount of controversy whenever it comes up on here, I don't think it's fully dead-dead even now.

I'm going to start using 4 spaces. Maybe.

I am 60 and learned 30 years ago that I could set most WP programs to automatically make the change to one space if my muscle memory made me type two after a period. I could keep muscle memory and still not have my writing tossed back by editors. And slowly developed new, better habits.

I am sixty and made the change successfully 30 years ago.

guess I'm old, oh well

No problem. I just won't write you. Because, when I learned to type, back in the bad, old days, we were required to use two spaces after the period in a sentence. So, since I'm not relearning to type, it's two spaces, after the period, period. :)

Yeah what’s wrong with those heinous freaks!!?? Always two spaces at the BEGINNING of sentences, duh!

I also distrust people who paid attention to minute details in writing classes.

Started my new legal job and learned that the *house style* is Times New Roman, justified text, two spaces at the end of a sentence. Dead.

What. .

I try to accommodate you kids when it don't make no never mind. Kid talked me into the pronoun thing, & I swore, when I got old, I'd never give kids any shit about their music & dress. So you can wear yer pants around yer ankles & listen to rap, if' ya want to. But I expect some accommodation, too.

Warm take: Monospaced fonts get two spaces; proportionally spaced fonts get one. Hotter: Use LaTeX to get proper 1.5ish spacing. But don’t forget the “\ ” after abbreviations like “Dr.”, or it will look weird.

I wanted to like LaTeX but thank goodness I never have to use it again.

"Dr" doesn't need a period tho

Depends on where you are. In the U.S. it does.