I still find people who do this
I still find people who do this
At my last job, a bunch of the older folks did not realize they had a "two spaces" habit.
It's a clear tell.
Saw this meme and thought I'd point that out.
And I'm going to keep doing it. Fight me.
Two spaces after a period was the way typography was taught and graded through the late nineties and maybe later. On a keyboard my thumb automatically double taps the space bar after a period. No thought, just reflex. On a phone, I never type a period. My keyboard app automatically inserts a period after a double space.
no, i dont think i will.
Watch me write fuck you in cursive.
Understood. I will use three spaces from now on.
I use two spaces and you are all "no cap fr fr skibidi Ohio fam."
Fuck off.
Imagine publically outing yourself as an agist POS with impulse control issues and an inability to rank issues worth talking about in any kind of sane manner.
Is this from that Oatmeal guy? He's always seemed very easily annoyed.
I'm over 40. I do what I want.
You're entitled to your opinion. Congratulations.
33 here and this is how I was taught
OP, this is a genuinely sent post on literally the first day of a new year. I want you to ask yourself something:
Does being bothered by this bring you any form of joy or happiness?
Does being bothered by this bring you any form of stress?
If the later is more true than the former, maybe you should think about that. You're taking time out of your day to be stressed about this thing and if isn't even paying you back in any meaningful way. It took you maybe 10min to make this post? Where would you be if that time was spent doing something you actually like doing instead of trying to bend the world on something so inconsequential as extra spaces?
I don't know if you'll take anything away from this, but of everyone stopped being hung up about things that didn't effect us, we'd all be better off.
It's about the typeface. Back in the day of manual or electric typewriters, we had monospace fonts, meaning that every character had the same width. A lowercase "i" got the same horizontal width as an uppercase "M".
Now we have word processors and proportional fonts, and the spacing after a period is built into the typeface.
One space after a period is correct, unless you are using Courier (or similar).
I had a guy review a document I wrote go through and "correct" all of my spaces by adding another one.
I do this in formal writing.
Such a zoomer meme.
I'm under 30 and I do this when not on my janky phone keyboard. It just feels right lol
The more acronym/initialism oriented English gets, the more that double space makes sense.
While I'm definitely in the "single space" camp myself, and have previously been pretty annoyed by people who still use two spaces, I actually like how often I see the double spaces on Lemmy because it reminds me that there are quite a few people over 25 on here. I'm not quite 40, and I don't think I was ever taught anything other than single space, but I have friends that still do two spaces.
Yeah, I’m old. When I was in high school, I was required to take a typing class before I could take a computer class. A computer class on the Apple ][e. (I said I was old!) On a typewriter, it was correct to add 2 spaces after a period, and that’s how I learned. I did it on the computer for a long time, but I eventually broke the habit. It wasn’t easy to break that muscle memory though!
I had the good fortune of attending a university that used the APA style guide, which gave me the opportunity to break free from the horrible MLA format that I learned in high school. So, no double space after a period for me, despite my advanced age.
Note: I understand that this is a typewriter thing, but while I had occasion to use a typewriter as a kid and teen, they were mostly no longer relevant already and I was never really taught anything directly related to typewriter typing. It is ridiculous that MLA stuck with that rule for so long (I don't know if they have dropped it since).
My 53 year old coworker does it even though it gets marked as an error in Word. I'm 40 and quit years ago when people figured out that fonts no longer require it for there to be obvious separation between sentences. I don't think it's really an age thing so much as it is a sign of adaptability, maybe?
Two spaces on a modern phone automatically gives you a full stop. Checkmate, atheists
Just use Find/Replace.
Find (double space) Replace with (single space)
Over 40. Never do this. The word processor has been doing it for me since WordPerfect 5
I was taught to do it this way in computer class 25 years ago. But I quit the habit sometime in the mid 2010s.
I stopped doing this before I turned 40. :P
I stopped that a long time ago and don't care who continues doing so. However I know that I'm dealing with a person who may be starting to sundown when I get emails written like that.
I never did that, even on a typewriter. Word processors do a decent enough job of spacing and it’d just look weird online.
My 33 year old husband does this. He went to an extremely rural school and they taught him to do this in computer class in high school. Drives me insane and it took me years to convince him it's not correct any more. He works in an industry where most people are older so I guess nobody really notices or cares.
I'm still a couple of years under 40. I only did this when I needed to extend the page count of a paper. However, my old man punctuation thing is that when I use commas before and after I, "quote," something on a sentence. Also, I don't care what Microsoft Word defaults are now, I write in Times New Roman.
Also a lot of people who put a space before punctuation, as in "really ?", which I've been told may be a tell that the writer is french or studied french.
(A lack of capitalization for country/demonym-ish nouns and adjectives may be a tell that the writer is norwegian—we just capitalize the proper country name, the rest comes off as random capitalization we'll often get wrong, with or without autocorrect.)
Why not just increase the size of a single space? Having two spaces is just extra work for no reason.
Edit: I decided to look up the original image and found this
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/Double-spaced refers to line spacing to leave room for notes. I don't think period-spacing exists. It seems like people correcting a behavior incorrectly so prevalently that now it's just something some people do, which is humorous.
It's better to have two spaces after periods with most fonts. It's not good when the commas and periods blend together. Nice to know at a glance where the ends of sentences are. If you look at it with fresh eyes, forgetting about what you're supposed to think, you'll probably end up with two spaces after periods, at least most of the time.
It's a major pet peeve of mine to see two spaces after a period.
I was taught to do that in word processing class in 1995 😭 I was only following orders!
Sometimes autocorrect does that too
Holy shit the traffic on this post is crazy
For those of you as stunned as I am that Word now marks two spaces as an error, there's how to fix it courtesy of Microsoft Answers
Although current convention is to use just one space when using proportional fonts (two spaces were used in typing because most typewriter fonts were monospaced), you can select which convention you want to use and have Word flag exceptions (or not). At File | Options | Proofing, beside "Grammar and Refinements," click Settings... In the Grammar Settings dialog, scroll down to Punctuation Conventions. You'll see that you can select one or two space or "don't check." As to why this just started, probably no one can tell you, but this is how to fix it.