Some lament the ‘LOL’ or deride the ‘delulu,’ but I’m not one of them.
I grew up with smartphones and think that, just as the invention of the printing press gave us words like “clique” and “uppercase,” Internet lingo adds something interesting to our vocabulary.
But of course, the web giveth and the web taketh away; some conventions, like the proper letter formatting we learned in school and cursive handwriting, have fallen a little by the wayside.
Whether or not that matters at all is a question of opinion. The same goes for another grammar rule I had no idea hundreds of years of writing brought in, and the computer took out ― double spacing after a full stop.
Why did it change?
According to Thesaurus.com, even the style guide APA, who they call a “staunch defender” of double spaces in general, changed their view on the post-full-stop spacing style in 2019.
“In 2020, Microsoft also struck a major blow to all the double-spacers out there when it officially categorized a double space after a period as a writing mistake in their popular Microsoft Word program,” they add.
Though some attribute the standardisation of double spaces after full stops to typewriters, Thesaurus points out that Bibles dating as far back as 1611 followed the rule.
Both printing presses and typewriters faced a similar problem: typesetting the end of a sentence so that it didn’t crowd out the following one was tricky.
That’s because, former copy editor for the New England Journal of Medicine Jennifer Gonzalez (who “learned to type in 1987 on an IBM Selectric typewriter”) says on her site The Cult Of Pedagogy, “every character was given the exact same amount of space on the page.
“That meant the letter i was given the same amount of space as the letter m, even though it clearly didn’t need it.”
New computer keyboards have something called proportionally spaced fonts, which consider the size of the character when compiling them ― spelling the end of the double space after a full stop.
It’s proved a generational gap
On her site, Gonzalez says “Nothing says over 40 like two spaces after a [full stop].”
Of course, that was written in 2014 ― it’s 50 now, by that logic.
But she adds that it was drilled into some generations’ heads for so long that it can be a very hard habit to let go of ― “We got our papers marked wrong if we didn’t. It takes a long time to unlearn that,” she wrote.
Her copy editing job, which she started in 1999, helped her adapt to the new way, she adds.
Still, it was enough of a common style choice in 2011 to incense a Slate writer, who wrote, “What galls me about two-spacers isn’t just their numbers. It’s their certainty that they’re right.”
For what it’s worth, Thesaurus.com says: “According to every major style guide you’ll find, the rule is a single space after a [full stop] or any other punctuation mark you use to end a sentence.”
“Studies have shown that, beginning with millennials, younger generations widely prefer the single space after a [full stop],” they added. Boomers and Gen X, however, tend to use a double space.