Two spaces after a full stop

[MyDuvetDay]

Do you do this?

Or do you correct this in other people’s work by deleting all their extra spaces?

MN deletes the double space automatically!

I’m a secretary and didn’t realise it wasn’t a thing anymore. I’ve always done it and will always do it!

Two spaces was standard when started work 30 odd years ago, as was justification, both have been standard for many years - if I look at a justified page it just looks wrong now. Single spaces and non justified n m skew text much more accessible.

I'm not interested in unlearning it. As I said, nobody I know is aware it's seen as unacceptable nowadays.
I really don't care if it shows my age. Tbh when I read something I don't even notice if it's got one or two spaces.

Same and same

I learnt to type on manual typewriters and double spaces were the norm. I absolutely did this until I was in my mid 20s and read that it wasn't necessary anymore because Word automatically put a slightly larger space after a full stop.

Always do it, trained formally to do it.
Military, signal/message writing. No room for ambiguity in the message, absolute clarity.
I won’t stop.

Yeah maybe it's specific to industry? My marketing colleagues use two spaces (I checked 😂) so it may depends where I guess.

I do it out of sheer force of habit. But currently practise/policy is one space.

Things change.

Interesting the passive aggressive term of 'correcting' is used when some people are content the two spaces are 'correct'.

How about double spacing between paragraphs? Is that right or wrong ?

Can you read it? Yes or no ?

I'm going through some paperwork of a deceased relative from 40 or so years ago. I was feeling a bit nostalgic looking at the layouts and formality, it's a world away from today's 'hi dave'.

I prefer to move with the times but each to their own. No one in my current workplace does it nowadays and it made sense for me to stop too, it took a while but it wasn't exactly difficult, it just felt like an improvement.

I do it and I like doing it. I doubt anyone in my workplace even notices, but if they do they would probably just write it off as a quirk of my age!

"Moving with the times" is fine but if I wasn't on MN I would have no idea about spacing after full stops.
I retired 4 years ago and wrote loads of pupil reports. Nobody ever remarked on spacing.

Good grief. I came here to judge people who don’t double space. I am older and more out of touch than I thought.

Yes, always 2 spaces. It drives me nuts when other people don't. My mum taught wordprocessing and we took exams. You'd have been marked down in the exams for only using one spce after a full stop.

Yes two spaces. I don’t care if it’s old fashioned. My thumb does it automatically and I DGAF.

I never knew double spaces were so widely used and loved! This is eye-opening.

Maybe the change happened back in the day of early mobiles when we had to pay for texts and character numbers were limited?

I wish I had learned to touch type. When I was at school they only allowed girls (it was the 1970s) who were academically weaker and unlikely to stay on for A levels to learn to type.

As a result I never knew about double spacing after a full stop.

As a copywriter we were restricted to a maximum number of characters so double spacing was out anyway. More recently the formatting would probably delete the extra space in the later software versions.

Mumsnet knocks out extra spaces anyway.

This is the first I'd ever heard of it not being the done thing any more. I had just assumed that people putting one space hadn't been taught properly. I find single-spaced text too dense and harder to read.

Where are you seeing text with two spaces?

I think most published work would be single spaced now. Mumsnet removes the double spaces - just testing to see if it does.

Nope. Throwback from typewriters.

One space is standard now.

I don’t care that much about the double spaces, but I do remove them (when copy editing). It’s justification that gives me the rage. My Kindle has started to revert to it for each new book and I’m terribly disappointed in it.

It wasn’t the done thing 25 years ago… look at a book. Or a newspaper article. None use double spaces after a full stop.