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.
It appears you’ve triggered the elderly
We’ve triggered the kids with spaces. SPACES
Kids want all the spaces to be safe, except for the spaces spaces. Fuck those safe spaces spaces.
It’s true, but indirectly.
Old people went to school and learned to write. I mean, they needed to use a pen and make letters and then - get this - were assessed and graded on it; and if they weren’t doing this well enough, it’s one of many reasons they as kids could have been - steel yourself - kept back from moving up to the next schooling year.
Really. The inability to ‘write’ could force someone to repeat actual learning again, and for a full year. Oh, the horror!
Similarly, we were taught how to make sentences and - it gets worse - write something creative, in this manual format, without errors, directly from something we called and imagination.
And the style guide of the time used two spaces. In addition to the requirements to make a sentence and a paragraph, properly, lest they be held back - not as a consequence of failure, if you’ve ever heard of the notion, but as part of a programme requiring success - also the style guide of the time was a little arbitrary. It’s like how the one-space fixation is equally arbitrary but without the ability to make a full sentence without kidgin or memes.
Yeah. Telling. It’s a tell. Watch me say ‘please’ or ‘pardon me’ and completely out myself as anachronistic. I often feel like this and other badges of honor like “being home alone and apparently not dying immediately” weigh me down a bit. I struggle. I’d demand a medal but all these medals are how I got this odd lean in my posture already.
It has to do with typesetting.
Fonts used to be monospaced, meaning every character has the same width.
We don’t do that anymore, now we have variable width fonts, where each character takes up only the space it needs.
No thanks, I want to improve the readability of my work.
This is the first time I’m hearing about double spaces. For me it seems that it would have the opposite effect.
Single spaces look odd to me, and yes, I’m in my 50s. But it does improve readability to me, breaks the thoughts apart just a bit. Not like we’re still indenting every paragraph!
Not like we’re still indenting every paragraph!
Wait, we’re not? I haven’t been in school for a long time so…
You don’t need to. We don’t use mono space font anymore. You can just read it normally.
Whoa there, some folks still do. They’re more accessible for dyslexic students, and also allow ASCII formatting for quick and easy questions creation on the fly.
I don’t know much about that. I know monospace is used when quoting lines of code. I’m talking about general academic and professional writing, and especially scholarly writing.
I’m sorry I’m over 40 and was never taught to do that crap.
You better be fucking sorry, you’re 39 going forward soldier!
39 and under the hill. They call me not gray beard…
I was taught to do it this way in computer class 25 years ago. But I quit the habit sometime in the mid 2010s.
Because it makes it easier to read so bite me.
I stopped doing this before I turned 40. :P
I had the good fortune of attending a university that used the APA style guide, which gave me the opportunity to break free from the horrible MLA format that I learned in high school. So, no double space after a period for me, despite my advanced age.
Note: I understand that this is a typewriter thing, but while I had occasion to use a typewriter as a kid and teen, they were mostly no longer relevant already and I was never really taught anything directly related to typewriter typing. It is ridiculous that MLA stuck with that rule for so long (I don’t know if they have dropped it since).
Why would anyone do that, and why would anyone whine about an extra space anyway?
Sorry, but this is a lot of fuss over nothing. Coming from 40+
I grew up with this. Typing class (as in typewriters) forced this behavior on me and I was graded on it. It’s a tough habit to break when your formative keyboard habits are suddenly wrong. It’s not that easy to stop when you’ve been doing it that way for thirty years.
I don’t have too strong opinions about the people who write like this.
But there’s a special place in hell for those creating websites and apps that render those spaces instead of automatically truncating to one space like the fucking Html standard expects. They have to go out of their way to enable worse looking writing.
Not sure why the downvotes, I fully agree with you. Those html standards breaking sites should burn in hell, especially the ones that still do anchor clicks with JavaScript
I had typing classes too, on type writers (45+ here) and never did double spaces. Why would you do that?
Because south carolina has always been behind on things. We had typewriters and the schools didn’t get actual computers for that purpose until 1995.
?
I don’t get it. That’s why you put yeonspaces after a dot?
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.
that’s so passive aggressive
I’m under 30 and I do this when not on my janky phone keyboard. It just feels right lol
What. A. Weird. Thing. To be annoyed. By.
yEAH.
Eye no rite?
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.
If you fucking illiterate children are going to murder language with “u” and “ur”, I’ll put two spaces after the period, which is the right goddamn way to format anyway.
You know, that actually doesn’t bother me as much as some other things. Your never going to guess what truly bothers me more than the short hand of u and ur. At least with the u and ur they have taken everything out of it.You’re example seems to… Okay I was going to do a you’re and make it possessive in this sentence but my aneurysm can only last so long.
The double spaces is a holdout from the age of typewriters, where spaces were all the same size. Modern fonts (non-monospaced anyway) already have different spacing between words compared to the spacing after a period.
If “ur” and “u” don’t belong in normal communication, neither does two spaces after a period.
Monospaced font is great though.I agree however I don’t know how to do that in lemmy.
Lemmy uses markdown, so:
Testing a few things
｀is this monospace? ｀
Or ｀is this monospace? ｀
Or <code>is this monodpace? </code>
I don’t object to you using this thread as a preview, but you might get better (or at least faster) results at something like:
test
Imagine being so deprived as to grow upwithour a typewriter.
False equivalency.
You’re literally the one that brought it up.
Well… yah, fair enough.
Putting two spaces after a period and using “u” and “ur” are not even on the same level. You can’t say one is the same as the other, using a letter to replace a word is next level. A double space can almost be missed honestly.
Well said!
Yep it looks and reads better than a single space.
I never did that, even on a typewriter. Word processors do a decent enough job of spacing and it’d just look weird online.
