Spaces after full stops. Anyone as old as me?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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?'

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.

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.

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

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.

Same here - once taught, never forgotten!

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!

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?

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?

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.

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!

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.

Two spaces after a full stop. This is what I was taught at secretarial college, in the seventies!

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GrandmaKT The logic behind the lower case start may have been that there is a comma after "Dear Sir, " not a full stop, so it is not a new sentence.

Farmor51 It does still matter that the wording is broken up in a way that makes the structure of the wording clear and easy to read. Have you ever read (tried to read!) a paragraph of text-speak with no punctuation, and the words become completely different ones because of their spelling? It could be a new system for a new era, not the one that was previously taught, but some kind of system is needed to help the reader.

I've just realised that the last posts on here were in 2019, until it was revived this morning. Sorry to Farmor518 and GrandmaKT for waking you up.

Yes Annakist same here. Attended secretarial collage in the 60's.

2 spaces after a full stop. Did any of you learn to touch type to the William Tell Overture. The man with the terribly posh voice telling us to 'cerriage' return.