I used to always use two (or three) spaces to take up more space on papers that need to be a certain length in pages. I guess this has changed over the years… I also heard they don’t teach cursive handwriting either. ugh.

Everyone who took typing class in high school learned that you always put two spaces after a period. The same goes for colons, questions marks, and exclamation points. Well, times have changed, and the two-space rule is dead.

Today, using just one space is correct. In BC times (Before Computers), printing presses and typewriters used letters that were all the same width. To help readers see that a new sentence was starting, we inserted two spaces. Today, computers compensate for the varying widths of letters. An “m” no longer takes up the same amount of space as an “i” does. Thanks to these proportional fonts, we no longer need that extra space.

Don’t believe it? Even the venerable Chicago Manual of Style says so. If you write for the web, HTML automatically removes the second space for you.

Source

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