Everyone remembers being taught to double space after your ending punctuation in sentences. While many students from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were never completely sure why that was a hard and fast rule, we still did it when typing on typewriters and then the computer. And for decades, it was the most common practice that was hard habit. But all of your childhood lessons might just go up in smoke.
The reason we originally began double spacing after periods was due to the mechanics of a typewriter. Before personal computers were a twinkle in anyone’s eye, the typewriter was the go to keyboarding component. Because of how the text looked on paper, a double space after a period spaced the text out so it wasn’t so overcrowded and could be read a bit easier. It became a standard rule of typewriting. Flash forward to the age of computers and advanced technology.
We no longer need to include the double space after a period because computer text is visually different from typewriting text. It may not look as overcrowded or unreadable as it did decades ago. The debate began in the mid-90’s of whether or not to do away with the double space rule. There are loyal subscribers to each camp – all absolute that their way is the only way. The standard became that both a single space and a double space were acceptable. Is that still the case?
More and more organizations and the younger generation are turning towards the single space domain, insisting that the double space is of great pain to all of writing. There is even talk that search engines will start to frown upon the extra space and that spiders will read that as a negative part of a site’s structure and/or content thus affecting search rankings. There is no definitive source that states this to be the case and Google has not made any official announcement to “kill” the double space.
For now, it is still a personal preference choice. Single or double space at your heart’s content. For this writer, I will defend my double space until the bitter end. The choice is still personal and until there are significant repercussions issued down from the SEO Gods, there doesn’t appear to be a reason to make too much fuss over it.
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