Spaces after full stops. Anyone as old as me?

To me it makes perfect sense. Whether it's correct or not, I find that visually, the extra spaces facilitate the reading, especially when it's a long paragraph or a lot of sentences. Likewise, two blank lines between paragraphs make it clear that it's not part of the previous one.

I learnt to type in the 70s (at school, wish I'd learnt shorthand too!) and we were taught 2 spaces after a full stop and one after any other punctuation. Still do it, as you say it's habit!

Shysal just looked back at mine. I think it must be. Right now I have two spaces. It reduces to one on preview. Mind you I am on my Kindle at the moment but I expect using the laptop would make no difference.

How come on my laptop every one of the posts stating that they always leave 2 spaces after a full stop has a single space? Is it being automatically changed?

My Sister in law insists that she was taught at school that after the salutation, the main body should start with a lower case letter.

e.g.

Dear Sir,
further to my letter of the 20th.....

I'm sure she miss-understood, but thought I'd ask in case it was actually the fashion at any time?

We have just had a 'branding exercise' at work, and told it must be only one space after a full stop. But after 40 years of typing two following secretarial training, there is no way I could now revert to one, two spaces is hard wired into the brain. So they will have to live with my two spaces!

Same here - once taught, never forgotten!

I went to a very smart secretarial college - it was 2 spaces after a full stop. It looks odd at three. This was in 1949/50.

That was then, this is now. Everything changes, and not always for the better.

Always did the 3 and 2 method on my secretarial course in the 50s - and all the counting for centring headings anakist - and don't get me started on loads of columns for tabulating purposes. However, I think the 3 and 2 rule was sensible because it made the document so much easier to read in that the separation of sentences was so well defined. Just one space makes them all run together.

Definitely taught the 3 a d 2 rule. Was in the mid 90s I learned the new system was 2 and 1 mainly using computers. Don't know if this was to help save time or perhaps paper. I think a lot of was Mogg is saying makes sense i.e. if you feel awful about what has happened does feeling really awful make it any better. My daughter was a real stickler. If anyone said "sorry" for something that happened or didn't happen and it should she would tell them if they were sorry they would do something to fix it and now! Otherwise you aren't sorry at all. If sorry appeared in a letter she ways expected it to be followed by a full explanation of what was being done to resolve the situation. Never say sorry without knowing what you are going to do or say to fix it was her motto. Miss her so much.

I watched the Parliament channel on Thursday and Rees-Mogg doing his first stint as leader of the House. He was asked a question from the Labour benches about when something might happen (can't remember the details I'm afraid) and rather than give a proper reply he said 'Why would anyone want to do that?'

Two spaces after a full stop and one after a coma. It's like riding a bike. It never goes away.

I was taught two spaces after full stop. Now when texting I automatically do two spaces which will add the full stop for me

Does it matter? With all the things going on e.g. BREXIT, NHS collapsing every day etc., none of which will have any effect on JR-M or his family, I do not understand why this man is being paid by tax payers to hold a ministerial role. Please note that I only have one space after the fullstop. In these days of texting and social media, spelling and punctuation are unimportant anyway.

I'm with Hetty58. I was a typesetter for many years, and there was always only one space after a full point. In fact, when I did office work for the first time, I went through the article taking out all the 'extra' spaces lol.

Grammar is an ever-changing thing surely? I totally agree that people should not be picked up on it. So often it's by someone who is writing in a way that, in itself, irritates others because of the rules they were taught.

Jacob is living in the past. He can afford to, most of us cannot. It is easy to teach for the past the difficulty comes in teaching for the future. Hats off to the teachers of today.

Watch out for the next diktat from "Jacob". It may well be that those going into modern farming must learn to work with horses instead of the brilliant modern farming machinery. There is no point in looking backwards unless it provides us with something other than the rose tint on our glasses.

annakist remember it well. 80 characters across a page, minus number of letters in the heading, divide remaining spaces by 2, indent by that amount! What about tabulations (columns!). Def 2 spaces after full stop. Used to indent each paragraph by 5 spaces until I got trendy and did block paragraphs?

JRM will make everybody use a quill pen I should think. As that’s a joke I should put a smiley after it but as he makes my blood boil I won’t.

Never did shorthand but am so happy now that Grammar was so well taught in yesterdays!
I still try to adhere to what I was taught when I write articles, letters etc. Sadly, many young people today do not know how to hand write 'paper' letters - albeit, they are good at 'speed written' texts.

How about the old 'love letters?'

Good for Jacob!

I expect someone has already pointed this out, but it’s pointless using double spaces when keying text in digitally, since the program will usually eliminate them. It was always a daft idea anyway. As a typesetter, I and my staff all had to make sure there were no double spaces in text destined for publication.

I took commercial studies at school in 1964 and we were taught to leave 2 spaces after a full stop and colon and one after a comma and semi-colon. That is the way we had to do it in the Civil Service too where I worked for many years.

The rule about not starting a sentence with and or but derives from earlier centuries when school teachers insisted upon it because you must never start a sentence in Latin with and or but.

Fowler rightly pointed out, or if not him, Otto Jespersen, that the rule has really no basis in English or most other modern languages.

I was taught when writing hand at junior school in the 1950s to leave the space of one letter after a full stop, semi-colon, colon, exclamation mark, or question mark.

Half the space of a letter was to be left after a comma and before and after brackets.

When I learnt to type we were taught to leave two spaces after the punctuation marks listed above, except for commas, which merited a half-space.

Some typewriters had no exclamation mark, so you typed a full stop then backed up a half-space and typed an upper case vertical line.

Computer keyboards do not have a half-space, so even if we wanted to the half-space rule would be very awkward to use.

Some time before I sat my Highers in 1967, new rules for punctuation were handed out at school. Actually I think they came in gradually, because we were, aged 10, instructed to write to-day as today and to-morrow as tomorrow and various other words lost their hyphens too.

Later the rule about leaving spaces after stops disappeared, as did the rule that "which" had always to be preceded by a comma and of course, the so-called Oxford comma, which I had been taught (the comma before and) was suddenly a heinous crime.

I still object to seeing sentences like, "the colours in the Union Jack are red, white and blue" because I was taught that the sentence read, "the colours in the Union Jack are red, white, and blue"

Another rule that some publishing houses have done away with is the one I adhere to: that inverted commas around direct speech must be preceded by a comma.
She said, "I love you." Her boyfriend replied, "I love you too. Let's get hitched!"

I think indenting at beginning of paragraphs has been superseded by double space. I used to indent but now just double space.