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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.
Very interesting. I hadn't noticed that before. Something to consider. I'll keep an eye out for that. /s
Not 40, but I still do it. When learning to type on a computer in school it was a requirement. I don’t mind though because now when I do it, periods are automatically added for me in place of the first space.
Bingo. 44 yr old here. I blame Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing back in the early 90s. I still sometimes do the double space at work when I'm on a ~~typewriter~~ keyboard.
30s, and that's how I was taught to type, so...
The more acronym/initialism oriented English gets, the more that double space makes sense.
Two spaces is very ingrained. Will probably never stop. Didn't even know the recommendation had changed until very recently. Why?
Two spaces on a modern phone automatically gives you a full stop. Checkmate, atheists
I am under 40, but had "two spaces after a period," drilled into me as a kid. I only broke the habit in the last year, and it still feels weird every time I use just one.
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.
I'm under 30 and I do this when not on my janky phone keyboard. It just feels right lol
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 always thought that it is because, after a period, in theory, you would take a slightly longer pause when speaking. Like the break between the last sentence and this sentence in your head.
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 god, think of all those wasted bytes just storing extra spaces. /s
I was taught to do it this way in computer class 25 years ago. But I quit the habit sometime in the mid 2010s.
What is a two space habit? I've never seen this in my life. I'm in my late thirties. Is this that's done only in America again?
Back in the days of monospaced fonts, it was common practice to put two spaces after the period ending a sentence to make text more readable. It's not an issue now that fonts are dynamically spaced, making words appear more "natural" and sentences thus easier to parse, but when every character had the exact same width it was hard to determine the "flow" of a sentence since it wasn't easy to see where it ended. I remember being taught in kindergarten/first grade to use two spaces after a period, even though we weren't using monospaced fonts then (to the best of my recollection). That's why this is an "over 40" thing - it was taught to older generations to accommodate the technology at the time, but nobody ever went back to "unprogram" this from their minds.
I love that none of the commenters on this post extolling double-spacing actually have visible double-spacing in their comments.
Just use Find/Replace.
Find (double space) Replace with (single space)
There's a user at work who puts quadruple ellipses after each sentence he types. It's just like he holds down . for a few seconds. I hate it.
I never did that, even on a typewriter. Word processors do a decent enough job of spacing and it’d just look weird online.
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.