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.
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 never did that, even on a typewriter. Word processors do a decent enough job of spacing and it’d just look weird online.
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'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.
Our typing software had it that way in 2000, so if you wanted to pass, you would have had to type 2 spaces after a period. Originally I think it is was about fonts not being so easy to seperate text apart so it would be easier to notice a thought being started/ended when skimming
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 get annoyed by trailing spaces for no reason.Trailing paragraphs before a page break are cursed, though.
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/
That's basically what computers do.
The rule is a holdover from monospaced type like from a typewriter. On a computer with a decent font and renderer it will generally make the spacing a little larger than an in-between-words space, but not a ton like double spacing would. Basically typesetting is way more complicated than people realize but since we solved most of the problems computers have with it in like, the 70s, most people don't tend to realize it unless they have design training.
The follow up post is significantly more interesting to me, as it basically mirrors the comment section.
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.)
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.
I was taught to do that in word processing class in 1995 😭 I was only following orders!
Just post something 💛