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.
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
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.
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 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 stopped doing this before I turned 40. :P
I never did that, even on a typewriter. Word processors do a decent enough job of spacing and it’d just look weird online.
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.
That's what I was saying. For people who are stuck to the holdover, it's just not useful to literally hit space twice if the goal is merely to increase the distance between the end of a sentence and the start of the next when the computer can do that for you.
It's literally the same argument between tabs vs spaces in code. The argument boils down to personal preference and taste of the amount of space. However, there is one truly valid argument that makes one more logical over the other: pressing a key multiple times to enter multiple characters to achieve a desired amount of space, instead of one key press and one character, is objectively bad.
If you simply prefer the stylistic difference, then you can change your settings to accommodate that. If you just don't want to do that, then do whatever you want. It's your prerogative to be lazy or whatever, and that's fine. Just like I don't care to add extra space after the end of a sentence because it doesn't bother me to have less.
However, anyone who teaches, preaches, or requires specifically adding extra key presses and extra characters is just plain wrong, because it's a stylistic preference. You can say that it's your preference to have more space, and you can say you don't care to change your settings so you don't have to press the key multiple times, but it is absolutely not objectively better in any way.
I get annoyed by trailing spaces for no reason.Trailing paragraphs before a page break are cursed, though.
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.)
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.
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.
Just post something 💛