I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
And another generation gap between people who use a double space after a period and those who just use a single space.
You can always tell when someone was trained to type on a typewriter when that happens.
I used double spaces until a friend of my aggressively dissuaded me from doing it recently. I wasn’t trained on a typewriter but I learned it from people who were, so there you go.
Why was a double space used?
Printing-press typesetters had a rule for how much space should be between sentences. Then people started having personal typewriters that were monospace, so to make their documents look similar to traditional publications and to more easily see the punctuation marks, people would put two spaces before starting a new sentence. Personal typewriters got more sophisticated with better spacing, making double-spacing unnecessary, and then computers came on the scene with word processing software, which also had no need for the improvised double-spacing.
But people had already learned from their teachers back in high school that they should double-space on the typewriter. So they taught it to their students with advanced typewriters and computers, and some of those students to this day just won’t quit.
Oh, this is really interesting! Thanks for sharing.
Typewriters were/are monospaced, so putting a double space after the full-stop helped you recognise the start of a new sentence, giving it, and you, breathing space.
The PC fonts are size adjusted and double space is no longer necessary, but it doesn’t hurt.
Thanks!
I still find it weird, though. I often use monospaced fonts and a double space just looks wrong to me.