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Forums - General Discussion - Two spaces after sentences

hsrob said:
alekth said:

Wow, I just had to google that and some people in a convo on wikipedia say they were taught to put two spaces as late as 1990. Personally I never encountered that (I've seen people consistently not leaving a space quite a few times, but never consistently two).

Was that practiced only in typewriter typing, or also in books? I should check at my parents' place tomorrow, the oldest printed book at my place is from 1966 and definitely only has one space after a full stop.


Wasn't it necessary to get automatic capitalisation at the start of the next sentence in earlier versions of MS Word/Works?

Seriously no idea, never used Word that much (and I disable automatic capitalisation now, used to doing it myself).

Anyway, there seem to be a wiki page on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing, confirms my suspicion that it was about the font. Maybe monospace is more legible with two spaces but ugh... googled some typed stuff in it and telling sentences apart seemed just fine with one space as well.

Guess in the end it's something that only people who went to typing classes were taught, and maybe sometimes still are. 



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I never knew people even did this. It's kind of ridiculous though.



RolStoppable said:

^Yay, he spelled it right.

What?



RolStoppable said:
Chrizum said:
RolStoppable said:

^Yay, he spelled it right.

What?

Ridiculous.

Ofcourse I spelled that right. Why wouldn't I?



RolStoppable said:
Chrizum said:
RolStoppable said:

Ridiculous.

Ofcourse I spelled that right. Why wouldn't I?

Good point, you are Dutch. The problem usually is most prevalent among native English speakers.

I am ridiculous.



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I was taught back when I was young to use two spaces, and I don't even remember from where.  Word has never given me trouble with the extra space so I've never bothered to change it.  Also, to be honest, this is the first time I've ever heard of it being a typography rule to only use one space...



It's hardwritten into my DNA.  I took typing class almost twenty years ago and I can't NOT do it.  I even do it in text messages, sometimes.  Muscle memory is hard to overcome.  It actually looks better in my opinion, though.



Sorry, Mr. rocketpig but I'm not going to stop.  At least, until I stop typing documents and whatnot.



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De85 said:

I was taught back when I was young to use two spaces, and I don't even remember from where.  Word has never given me trouble with the extra space so I've never bothered to change it.  Also, to be honest, this is the first time I've ever heard of it being a typography rule to only use one space...

Same here, even though I was going through elementary school in the late 90's, I was still taught to use two spaces.  I think it has a lot less to do with what is proper, and a lot more to do with what is a lot easier to read.  If I can recall correctly, the justification teachers used is that there is one space after commas and words, so putting 2 spaces makes it much clearer that a new sentence is starting, despite there being a period to indicate that.



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I'd be much more likely to trust something from MLA than an article from Slate.com, which I have never heard of.

http://www.mla.org/style_faq3

MLA, which around here anyways, is very common in regards to standards for writing, indicates that while one space is becoming more common, practically speaking, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.