please empty your brain below
Ijustliketowriteastreamofconsciousthought#

Ken | 02.06.20 - 8:09 a.m. | #

I was taught to leave a double space after a full stop in IT lessons at school in the late 90s. I only stopped doing it a couple of years ago, when I was quite surprised to discover that single spacing had been the standard since the 1950s!

Alan | 02.06.20 - 8:10 a.m. | #

Child of the fifties/sixties. Always been a double space man until recently. But now converted to a one spacer.

Roger French | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 8:11 a.m. | #

I tend to leave a space before question marks and exclamation marks because without a space they seem to become lost on a computer screen !
Not the same effect in print.

Winston Churchill insisted on double spaces.

scrumpy | 02.06.20 - 8:12 a.m. | #

I'm with Word. Down with this sort of thing!

Frank F | 02.06.20 - 8:14 a.m. | #

I find my fingers tapping three spaces. I was taught to do so when I attended typing classes decades ago. Now it’s difficult to break the habit, although I know that three spaces makes my work look old fashioned.

Pam | 02.06.20 - 8:15 a.m. | #

What I find irritates my eye is inconsistent spacing. Occasional word documents seem to have a mixture of double and single spaces after full stops. Possibly because written by more than one person, or by one person transitioning between the two conventions.

Malcolm | 02.06.20 - 8:19 a.m. | #

I used to teach RSA Word Processing in the late 80s and 90s. Their guidance was that you could use either single or double spaces after a full stop but you had to be consistent - a piece of work with mostly single spaces and a couple of double spaces would fail.

Steve Rochford | 02.06.20 - 8:19 a.m. | #

Same as Alan, encouraged to double space when programming. This then became natural when typing anything on screen. Trying to stick to one space nowadays.

Kevin | 02.06.20 - 8:19 a.m. | #

I was taught to use double spaces by my mum who learned to type on a typewriter. I had people in primary school telling me it was wrong but over the years I have decided I prefer it. It's just easier to see where the new sentences are.

Sally | 02.06.20 - 8:22 a.m. | #

I'm 45, and didn't even realise double spacing was a thing until well into adulthood. Obviously I'd been reading books and newspapers that had it, but never noticed when it came to typing up my own things. Never owned a typewriter.

Chz | 02.06.20 - 8:30 a.m. | #

It was only a few years ago I found out double spaces were a thing. I'm 21, so that probably explains why.

Erling | 02.06.20 - 8:37 a.m. | #

The one that I found offensive to the eye was the missing apostrophe.

Dont is an acronym for a Bridge call meaning Disturb Opponent's No Trump.

Similarly cant is to place something at an angle, wont is a wish, and havnt means you're looking for a place in Hampshire and having difficulty with the sat nav.

Annoyingly for all four above the autocorrect put the apostrophe in for me.

Putters | 02.06.20 - 8:49 a.m. | #

Ok, mea culpa. I recognize one of those comments.
My excuse? I never learned to touchtype and can only do this with one finger.
But,I think it looks better with double space between sentences because that is how I would write with a pen(remember those?)
If I have a comment to make it will be in the same manner.

Jo W | 02.06.20 - 8:50 a.m. | #

I was taught to type with a double space once upon a time, and it would be a hard habit to break if I wanted to. However, on iPhone and iPad I just hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence and the ghost of Steve Jobs inserts a full stop and makes the next letter upper case automatically. It’s so easy, why would I stop?

Vee Jay Em | 02.06.20 - 8:52 a.m. | #

I consistently use two spaces. I was never taught to type, but I’m 74, so I may simply have absorbed the practice from the culture. Reasons for persisting: I prefer the look of a double space, and (especially when san-serif fonts are involved) two spaces after a full stop make it easier to distinguish it from a comma. I also place two spaces after colons and semi-colons, rebel that I am. Plus I have no intention of conforming with pointless rules (vague pun noticed but not intended).

lilyami | 02.06.20 - 9:01 a.m. | #

A lot of commenters avoid the double space issue by hitting ‘return’ after every sentence instead.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 9:01 a.m. | #

I learned to touch-type in the mid-90s using Mavis Beacon, and that taught us to leave 2 spaces after a full stop. I'm now an academic, and have found that most (all?) publishers want a single space, so I've got in the habit of using the find/replace function on Word. It's very hard to change an ingrained habit, not so much of the fingers but of the brain: even if I'm trying to avoid typing double spaces, some always get in there.

Ed S | 02.06.20 - 9:06 a.m. | #

I too learned to type on a typewriter and the double space after a full stop is ingrained. Until now I never realised that it is 'autocorrected' on a computer. Also, we were taught to leave a double space between paragraphs. But I have noticed that it is sometimes reformatted by whichever program I'm using.

Dave | 02.06.20 - 9:29 a.m. | #

A lifelong double spacer here. I don't see that changing and I had absolutely no inkling that single spacing was now the norm and double spacing even considered 'wrong'. I suppose I did learn to type on a typewriter and it must come from those rather strict lessons.

anon | 02.06.20 - 9:36 a.m. | #

Convention in some European countries is to put a space before colons and semicolons, even when writing in English. I remove the space when editing for publication.

jack hopkins | 02.06.20 - 9:43 a.m. | #

If people are interested, the reason why any comments here (and indeed, elsewhere on the Web) only show one space instead of two after a full stop, it's to do with how the HTML code is parsed. When the browser sees any number of spaces in the text, it will only show one.

In order to 'force' the double spaces in today's post, DG will have used the non-breaking space HTML element: & nbsp ; (I've added spaces into that, ironically, as I'm not sure how the commenting system would parse it)

Typing in a word processor doesn't (or shouldn't) have the same effect, and any double spaces should stay as such. Back in the day, if you saved a Word document as a HTML page, it would keep any multiple spaces as they were, by changing any additional ones into the nbsp character.

Personally, however, I am a single space person... mostly because I do a not insignificant amount of web design. When I was taught to type, I was told to put two spaces after a full stop, but interestingly, only one after any other sentence-ending punctuation such as an exclamation mark or question mark.

RG | 02.06.20 - 9:50 a.m. | #

I took an evening class in the late nineties in Computer Literacy and Information Technology (CLAIT) and in that we were told to use a double space after a full stop. I tend not to do that now unless I am writing a particularly long paragraph, then I feel it helps to break up the text rather appearing as one big block of text.

Barry | 02.06.20 - 9:54 a.m. | #

Ah,you're missing the real capital crime of typewriters and word processing.Deciding that a comma or full point is equivalent to a space,so when you type either you don't need a space alongside.Appalling.Should be banned.But it's surprisingly common.

AlanBG | 02.06.20 - 9:56 a.m. | #

I find HTML space suppression annoying. It's just a character I choose to use so why is it treated differently from any other character?

Training for DS after FS started with typewriters which of course use a monospaced font. There, I think it helps legibility, and I suppose the authors of typing manuals did too.
Early word processors also used monospaced fonts, both on screen and in printouts, and so does this comment entry field.

A few years ago I produced a printed book using Microsoft Word. Although I normally use DS after FS, I enforced SS after FS in the book using search and replace because I thought that was right for print. But I've just looked at a small sample of my printed books. The Victorian ones had DS after FS and the modern ones (post 1970) had SS after FS. But books printed in the first half of the 20th century varied so it was not a definite rule.

Tony | 02.06.20 - 9:58 a.m. | #

I never knew whether a space before a question or exclamation mark was correct, but to me it looks better than being attached to the last word, except when it wraps onto a new line !

kev | 02.06.20 - 9:59 a.m. | #

My dad wrote a book using just one finger on his manual typewriter.

He always double spaced.
I learnt it from him.

When typing comments using my phone rather than my laptop I often check that the double space is there before pressing publish as sometimes the words look far too close.

Glad to see one of mine on your list!

ap | 02.06.20 - 10:08 a.m. | #

I liken a double space to a semi-colon: It is a pause for breath, but in the case of a double space it is a pause for the writer, not the reader.

Temp | 02.06.20 - 10:08 a.m. | #

I learnt to use double spaces after a full stop when I was taught in school how to use a typewriter (they decided it was a useful skill if you were doing GCSE Business Studies, and to this day I'm still faster at typing than most people I know). That would have been about 1990 and so I'm surprised there are people older than me saying they never knew double spacing was a thing. I'm 44 now and only realised single spacing was now the norm about 10 years ago. I initially continued out of habit but when I decided to try and force myself out of it I was surprised how easy it was to change.

Anders | 02.06.20 - 10:15 a.m. | #

48-year old lifelong single-spacer here.

Stephen | 02.06.20 - 10:16 a.m. | #

I'm 51, and never been a double spacer, but to paraphrase Ben Elton :-

"Double space, double space, gotta type a double space. Double space, double space, gotta type a double space..."

Mikey C | 02.06.20 - 10:29 a.m. | #

I'm a Legal Secretary, so it was how I was trained - and most of the time (letters, documents, Court pleadings) mine are indeed seen. Being a touch typist for many years now, I'm not sure I could stop if I wanted to!

H D Inglis | 02.06.20 - 10:40 a.m. | #

I'm am a 50 year old, educated in Canada. Learned typing in high school, where double spacing after a full stop was the norm. I took that forward with me, and usually double space when typing on my computer. When typing on my phone, I never double space.

Greg | 02.06.20 - 10:41 a.m. | #

In my experience spaces before question and exclamation marks are common in some European languages (like French).

Anonymous | 02.06.20 - 10:45 a.m. | #

I'm a single spacer. Proportional fonts should make a single space look good after punctuation.

I must admit that the space before punctuation is a horrible eyesore. It does not make the text easier to read. It may be a side effect of this commenting system's tight line spacing and wide comments that make things harder to read in general.

Sykobee | 02.06.20 - 10:50 a.m. | #

I learned to type when monospaced typefaces were common, albeit on a computer screen not a typewriter. Indeed, I am typing this comment in a monospaced font, although it will display in a proportional font. I still find it easier to read text with two spaces after a full stop, even in Word with a proportionally spaced typeface

Some years ago I went through a phase of adding three spaces after a full stop, and two after other punctuation, again with the aim of improving to improve readability of the text, but decided a long time ago that was unnecessary.

Typographical rules should be about improving the readability of text, so I'm not too bothered if a writer wants to add a extra space after or even before punctuation if they think that makes the text clearer, particularly in informal cases like this. I would not consider it to be correct in formal writing.

In the past,I corresponded for some time with someone who though spaces after punctuation was superfluous,as the meaning was clear already.That is very much a minority view,and I don't like it.

Apparently, ""Nothing Says Over 40 Like Two Spaces after a Period!". Some say it is "totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong".

dg writes: Andrew is using three spaces after a full stop today, and two after a comma.

Andrew | 02.06.20 - 11:07 a.m. | #

I was always taught to use double space, and I'm mid 40s. I'm not sure whether my northern town was just 20 years behind the times, or whether my IT teachers were just old fashioned. But then again my infant school teachers forced me to write right-handed, overcoming my natual left-handedness, so perhaps it's the former.

Brad | 02.06.20 - 11:14 a.m. | #

As a fifties child, I was brought up using a typewriter and my use of grammar was based on the English teaching at the time. I normally only use single spaces, but I occasionally use double spacing where a single space doesn't look as if it shows a gap properly. This tends to be more for on-screen work such as messages, replies, comments, etc. I find that if typing something that will be printed out (e.g. using Libre Writer), it is rarely a problem. Presumably it depends on the way it is displayed on the screen.

Very rarely I might add a space before a punctuation mark, and that is only when it doesn’t look right on the screen without one. Punctuation marks floating on their own between sentences just look wrong!

One other thing is when the font used in the comments box is different to that displayed on the screen afterwards - as in the case with the DG Comment box which uses monospaced type. Something can be typed in the box which looks OK, but then when seen in preview or in the actual post the layout can look different.

rogmi | 02.06.20 - 11:17 a.m. | #

I started an editorial career in 2007, and throughout I have worked with print and digital. Probably slightly more with print. Nowhere I've worked was the style to use double spaces. I was aware that some publishers (used to) set that way, but to me it sounded like an old print convention that is no longer necessary, owing to changes in typesetting and publishing technology.

An editor | 02.06.20 - 11:22 a.m. | #

I used to work for Matt Hancock before he started his current health job. Instructions from his office specified a double space in drafts prepared for him to sign. I didn’t do it, because I live on the edge...

Baldassaro | 02.06.20 - 11:31 a.m. | #

Exactly the same as Alan. Taught to type (for some values of taught) in the mid/late 90s on semi-antique RM 480Z computers - that were two unpleasant shades of contrasting brown.

Only had the habit beaten out of me when I started editing a car club magazine a few years ago.

Steve | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 11:43 a.m. | #

Ten of today's commenters have included a double space.

A reminder that you're perfectly welcome to do this, but nobody else will see them.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 12:00 p.m. | #

Learned to type (manual typewriter) over 40 years ago. Must have absorbed the double space convention without realising. Now it's hard wired into me, I always do it.
(Much to the frustration of a former house mate who was a senior sub editor at the Press Association, and never ceased telling me the error of my ways)

IslandDweller | 02.06.20 - 12:31 p.m. | #

I was never formally taught to type, so I just do a single space after a full stop. It's purely a matter of style and appearance, after all.

Presumably it all goes back to the requirements of manual typesetting, though what issue it was intended to address I can't imagine.

It might even just be the peculiarities of visual design "orthodoxies" such as those that have decreed that initial caps for proper nouns look untidy in a printed page, and similar nonsenses.

Autolycus | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 12:43 p.m. | #

Long-term double spacer here, can't recall why or when but it must predate my first website in late '97 due to me realising the need to include nbsp;. (I'd forgotten all about that until reading one of the comments above). It may have been because I like seeing clear gaps between sentences; with handwriting it's easy but with type you need the double space. But that's just a guess.
And no-one except DG will see my double spaces above...

Graham | 02.06.20 - 12:44 p.m. | #

In 1995 I did got a City and Guilds Level 1 in Word Processing. Did it on an Atari ST at sixth form college. Yes we were taught to double space. I have tried to break the habit. It's very hard to do so. Even on a mobile phone I see I am doing it.

Andrew Bowden | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 12:47 p.m. | #

The spaces in a computer document, or a typewritten one, can be counted. In a printed or typeset one, they should be measured instead. The amount of space left after a full stop is not forced to be an integer multiple of the space between words (which is anyway variable if the text is justified). In the small sample of one book that I have just looked at, the ratio appears to be about 1.4

Malcolm | 02.06.20 - 1:03 p.m. | #

I think double space is the right way to do, even though I almost type exclusively on PC (i.e. almost no typewriter experience). I think the double space tells the reader more clearly that I am really typing a full stop, instead of, say, abbreviation dots like the ones in "P.S."

Patrickov | 02.06.20 - 1:06 p.m. | #

I'm in my 50s, self taught on the computer. I had no idea double spacing was a thing either.

What I do know is that as one of my duties is to proof-read text received from a variety of senders, it is only the nonagenarian that does it, and it is a right pain to remove when compiling it into a word document!

It's strange that it automatically removes double spacing, but doesn't seem to add a space when one isforgotten!

Cornish Cockney | 02.06.20 - 1:07 p.m. | #

I've learnt to not double space after a blog mate wrote about it many years ago. I think we probably should at the end of sentences, but I really don't care and I am happy with the new single space and I am now used to it.

Andrew | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 1:30 p.m. | #

SwiftKey has taken to occasionally inserting a space between the end of a sentence and a question or exclamation mark, which may explain some of those instances. I haven't been able to determine under what circumstances this phenomenon occurs but, as you'd imagine, it's a pain to have to go back and correct it every time. Sometimes you correct it and it will insist on inserting it again. I will not be cowed, however. Grrrr.

tops | 02.06.20 - 1:34 p.m. | #

I’ll be 55 in Sept and learnt to touch type in my teens. I was taught to double space and have always done so. It’s habit and I don’t even think about doing it when doing it. I didn’t know, until this post, that it was no longer the done thing. I won’t be changing to single spacing. Old dog new tricks and all that.
Cxx

Chris | 02.06.20 - 1:38 p.m. | #

Hmmm... mentioned in dispatches !   I'm an unashamed double-spacer simply because IMHO it looks better, but YMMV.  Similarly, I prefer a space before an exclamation mark: we tend to recognise words by their outlines, so it's just good manners to show the symbol separately rather than as a carbuncle.  However, I tend not to do the same for a question mark, probably because it's wider and more distinctive.

At best, single spacing represents dumbing down, similar to the omission of commas, apostrophes, hyphens, semi-colons etc; SMS must be the main culprit.  Along with deliberate use of names all in lower case (DG, I'm looking at you), TxtSpk has become endemic on the grammar highway.

Gerry | 02.06.20 - 2:16 p.m. | #

HTML space suppression was originally designed to be hand-written in relatively primitive text editors (and indeed it still is by some people), so people would use whitespace characters (space, newline, and tab) to arrange the HTML to look neat, to help them understand the code when writing it. But you don't usually want this to affect the final outcome too much, so all this whitespace is collapsed down into a single space.

However even the way HTML does it isn't perfect, as you can still end up with single unwanted spaces when trying to practice indentation. You can see some (rather ugly) ways people have tried to get around this issue here.

Muzer | 02.06.20 - 2:50 p.m. | #

I've always assumed that double spacing became a convention during the typewriter era because if a letter was missed out of a sentence and it had to be overwritten, there would be space to add the missing character without interfering with the following sentence. Consider it almost as 'insurance' against mistakes.

Now that we have word processors which can insert letters while automatically reflowing the text of subsequent paragraphs, there should be no need to add double spaces.

James Armitage | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 2:53 p.m. | #

I'm in my twenties and I double-space, mainly because I was taught it by my mum. I've found that certain online things do render both spaces but, when a full stop happens to fall at the end of a line, only convert the first space into a line break, leaving an ugly space at the beginning of the new line. This should probably be enough to make me change my behaviour, but it isn't.

One thing that does still use a wider space after a full stop—though not a full double one—is TeX/LaTeX, used for typesetting a lot of mathematical documents. After any full stops that occur mid-sentence (like "Mr. Jones"), you're supposed to place a backslash before the space, to force the system to produce a normal-width space instead of a sentence-ending one (the backslash itself doesn't appear). I don't think many people do this in practice.

Alex | 02.06.20 - 3:07 p.m. | #

I learned touch typing at college in 1977 and I was taught to do double spacing then. To increase your word per minute speed, the trick is to not think about how you are typing but to disengage the brain and let the muscle memory in your fingers go to the right key. My thumbs are therefore deciding on double spacing for themselves. However, thank you DG for the exercise in mindfulness.

Nails UK | 02.06.20 - 4:22 p.m. | #

> They really came into their own with the typewriter, where the use of a monospaced typeface necessitated more of a gap.

But that makes no sense. The full stop in a monospaced font has its own gaps either side. Even the blobbiest typewriter dot won’t come close to touching the characters before and after. And the standard space width in most digitised proportional fonts is narrower than most letters – narrower indeed than every letter in Times Roman, and narrower than every letter except f, i, j, l, t and capital I in Helvetica. Typically nowadays a space is equal to the width of a full stop and exactly half the width of a digit. Handy for lining up columns of figures. Seems more likely that typewriting instructors were simply more conservative than typesetters. With the abandonment of full stops in abbreviations, there was no longer the ambiguity which Patrickov notes above as to whether a stop was the end of a sentence. So single spaces are less confusing now than they once were. Though that doesn’t explain why double spacing was eschewed in America as rapidly as in Britain despite the U.S. being slower to abandon abbreviatory stops. But typesetters prefer the more even density of text on the page. Perhaps the demotic power of desktop publishing encouraged a rationalist generation to rebel against the fussiness of its parents. The final frontier.

Rich G | Homepage | 02.06.20 - 4:32 p.m. | #

USE
"ampersand"nbsp semicolon will do the trick, I think
Let's try it:

I think that spacing out ...     ... is a really good idea.

faucet | 02.06.20 - 5:56 p.m. | #

I currently work for a city council. Their policy is that all correspondence should have double spacing,

Agent X | 02.06.20 - 7:28 p.m. | #

I'm 51, but never a typist. These are my thoughts on this crucial topic.

Double space after full stop: always done it, because it provides a visual break. Except I don't bother when I know it will be changed automatically, which I guess is most places.

Space before punctuation: that looks weird. Never occurred to me that some people do it deliberately!

What bugs me: facebook comments, because the comment you write appears with just a single space following your name, which is unnecessarily confusing. To get round that I start all my comments with a full stop and hard return so that my comment appears on the next line. If I could do a hard return without the minimalist punctuation character then I would, but without it FB removes the hard return. If you don't like it that's fair enough. But you're wrong :-) (And I concede that at least more recently, it’s obsolete on mobile as comments do automatically start on the line after your name, but it’s a blessing for those who use FB on a desktop.)

Wayne | 02.06.20 - 7:58 p.m. | #

68 and have never used a double space after a full stop. Not formally taught to type - currently using developed "hunt and peck". If anything there seems to be a recent growth in the use of double space after full stops - I certainly seem to be editing more of them out of other people's texts these days. Mind you in a world which allows comic sans to exist this is not an issue that causes me any real concerns...
And I am surprised at the huge number of comments when the wonderful time series of the Lea only gets 8.

Westville13 | 02.06.20 - 8:34 p.m. | #

Single spaced unless drafting for others who have double spaced as a rule. As mentioned above inconsistency grates far more than single or double.

Robert Butlin | 02.06.20 - 8:50 p.m. | #

I thought it was just me who didn't understand why double spaces seemed to have disappeared. I have spent ages 'correcting' things because I find it so irritating and, harder to read. It just looks wrong to me. You can blame it on learning to type in the mid-60s whilst at William Morris Tech.
I am amazed by the number of responses, and the variety of comments this item has provoked.
so, my thanks to DG and to all of you for enlightenment. I will though still use two spaces.

gchingford | 02.06.20 - 9:21 p.m. | #

I learnt to word process in the early 90s and was taught to add two spaces, but at some point I have - without consciously trying - abandoned the habit. My boss, I've just noticed, persists with it. And I do notice: misplaced spaces cause me constant low- evel irritation. My annoying habit is the over-use of parenthesising hyphens - which Word kindly converts into em-dashes, but Google (and presumably HTML) doesn't.

Sarah | 02.06.20 - 9:23 p.m. | #

Like many others, I was taught the rules of typing as a teenager by my mother, who is now in her seventies. As a touch typist, it would take some effort to stop, and I quite like the traditional appearance. I only started to doubt the practice when I read in the news last year that Jacob Rees-Mogg requires his office staff to use a double space. That's left me in a dilemma as I feel I should disagree with him about everything.

James | 02.06.20 - 9:30 p.m. | #

The document processing software where I work converts double spaces to non-breaking spaces in its HTML output. The day after Jacob Rees-Mogg’s instructions were in the news I went through and made sure everything was using the single spaces we prefer.

Sprout Eater | 02.06.20 - 10:22 p.m. | #

I too learned to type over 55 years ago, and in those days it was three spaces after a full stop (or equivalent, e.g. question mark, exclamation mark). Also two spaces after a colon or semicolon, and one after a comma. Having since worked in the publishing industry, I found Robin Williams' The PC is not a Typewriter a very useful monograph.

Tim W | 03.06.20 - 10:13 a.m. | #

I was taught to put two spaces between sentences in commercial course at school in 1960s to the William Tell overture.

Angela | 03.06.20 - 10:36 a.m. | #

Pipped to the post on Robin Williams.

Don't worry (about the double space) be happy !!

MilesT | 03.06.20 - 7:41 p.m. | #

My phone keyboard has both English and French loaded, including automatic detection of which language I use for its autocorrect. If it thinks I'm typing in French, which often happens when I type an English word with which it's unfamiliar, it'll automatically add spaces before most punctuation other than . or , and I always have great difficulty overriding it!

Leo | 03.06.20 - 8:19 p.m. | #

Now that Tim W mentions it, I think that must have been what I was doing: three spaces after a full stop, two after a colon or semi-colon, and one after a comma. (Two after a comma would be excessive :*)

I suspect I picked up the habit from an old book owned by my mother, who trained as a secretary in the 1960s. And then a touch-typing programme beat it out of me. I have a CD of Typequick here somewhere...

Andrew | 04.06.20 - 4:07 p.m. | #











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