This has been bugging me for a while, but especially recently.  Since I learned to type, I have always put two spaces after a period.  Somewhere along the lines that changed…but I didn’t relearn to type, nor do I keep up with any publications that would have mentioned this change, so how the hell was I supposed to know?  You know how I found out?  I took a typing test and I kept failing because my extra space after each sentence was counted as a mistake.  When I tried to correct it, my speed dropped from 100wpm to about 85, because I had to keep consciously fixing my spacing “errors”.  Recently I’ve also been running across the single-space rule in less academic endeavors, and I almost scream after I finish a page of text and realize I have to go back and fix my sentence endings!

I hear a rumor that the double-space rule was in place during the typewriter era because of monospaced fonts, and that single-space is a result of proportional fonts in modern word processing.  Screw that I say, I use monospaced fonts for damn near everything anyway!  I honestly don’t know if I can muster the will to reverse nearly 20 years of muscle memory.  I guess I will just have to consciously deal with it when doing things that require single-space conformity.  And as I type this, I realize that all my double spaces after my sentences are going to be obliterated by the magic of the HTML parser in your browser/aggregator, because it almost invariably will ignore the second one as extraneous whitespace and remove it.

**Edit** Whoa!  The Blogjet editor puts an HTML non-breaking space code in place for the first space of my post-period double-spaces...so you get to see them in their glory!

Is it still two spaces after a colon?

(this has been a random rant about a really insignificant topic.  you’re welcome.)