How to train myself out of double-spacing after a period?

April 25, 2024 12:26 PM

As an elder millennial, I was trained to double-space after periods at the end of sentences. How do I train myself out of it?

What it says on the tin. I've been typing on a keyboard for 25+ years now and no matter what I do I can't seem to retrain my muscle memory to the now-standard/expected single space after a period. I attempt to type slowly and deliberately to skip the second space on the first try, but my job and brain don't really allow me to move that slowly. I often end up editing everything I write to delete the extra space.

This is something I want to do FOR REASONS, so please no answers resembling 'who cares, do what you want'.

Thanks!

posted by greta simone to Computers & Internet (24 answers total)

Here's what I did:

Every time you type the extra space, delete back to it and correct it.

Don't wait until the end of your document and remove them all with Find/Replace.

Don't mouse click over and delete them once you notice them.

You need to make it hurt.

Every time you do it, you have to retype everything you have typed since you did it.

(Within reason, I mean, I wouldn't go back and retype an entire paragraph because I missed one double space at the beginning, but I would if I double spaced every sentence in the paragraph.)
posted by jacquilynne at 12:30 PM on April 25 [12 favorites]

I'll be honest, as someone who's been double-spacing after periods for the last 45 years: if it's important that the spacing be consistently single, type as you normally do and then do a find/replace afterwards.
posted by praemunire at 12:31 PM on April 25 [16 favorites]

#1. A few minutes of mindful practice every day, but without putting any particular pressure on yourself. Just type for even just 1-2 minutes and take care to consciously type the one space after the period.

#2. Some automated way to proof any/all work you do to find the inevitable slip-ups. I do a lot of things like Ctrl-F for two spaces for things like that I know are likely problem points. Almost everywhere you can type text has some kind of find functionality and all you have to do is open that and type space-space, then search.

Maybe there is some way to program this into whatever spell check or grammar check utilities you regularly use. This would be very easy to add into Word, for example.

Again, don't beat yourself up about mistakes or any such thing, but (as much as finding/fixing any slip-ups) the goal here is to just make you aware when this issue happens and hopefully, create a trendline where it is happening gradually less and less over time.

Habits like this are very, very ingrained at a very low level of the motor/nervous system. So they are correspondingly, very, very hard to change. It is going to take a long time. It is going to take something more like a long, sustained period of low effort rather than one short but very difficult lift. Particularly for that very reason it is important to not get mad or beat yourself up about mistakes. Just take more of the Zen approach where you notice what is happening without really trying to change it. You're not feeling strong emotion about it. You're just observing. If you are noticing anything it is a bit of the absurdity of human physical skills, where it can be so hard to change such a simple little thing. You just chuckle and continue - it's a normal part of life.

P.S. I just Ctrl-F search for space-space and what you know, I automatically double spaced after every single period in this response. Even though I obviously had it at top of my mind the whole time. We learned and drilled this in 7th Grade Type Class and it has stuck in firmly from then until now. Point is - don't underestimate the difficulty of changing this. It is very, very, VERY hard and any little bit of progress you can make on it is well worth celebrating.
posted by flug at 12:38 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

If the reasons are task-specific and you're writing in software that can do automatic text replacement/autocorrect and lets you define words to autocorrect, you might be able to just define two spaces as something that should be automatically replaced with a single space, as you type.

I attempt to type slowly and deliberately to skip the second space on the first try, but my job and brain don't really allow me to move that slowly.

Alongside what jacquilynne suggests, I would still take at least ten or so minutes each day, ideally a few times a day, to really focus on the spacing thing. Practice it while typing both slowly and quickly; either way the point is to focus less on the content and more on the habit of following a period with a single space and a capital letter, or of following a period with a single space (maybe hit it with a decisive flourish) and then pausing.
posted by trig at 12:40 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

I was also trained to do this, and now I don't. What helped was that I was in a situation where I needed to produce a bunch of documents using the single space, but at the same time I was also starting to feel the pinch of ageism. (In my own head, if nowhere else.) Stripping it out using Find + Replace causes the least ass painage, but it still does.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:40 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

I was you at the start of the internet.

Stare at the enormous gap of two spaces until it looks ungodly and unnatural.

You must look at the void.

Keep looking till that voice says, you know it is too big.

And walk away.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:40 PM on April 25 [19 favorites]

Even an elder Gen Xer such as yours truly can be trained out of it. I spent years find-and-replacing two spaces-to-one at an editing job, so it got drummed into me. Also, it's been 30-plus years since I used a typewriter on a regular basis.

It can be done!
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 12:41 PM on April 25

Also, if you can't use autocorrect, don't like the global search/replace option because you're worried you might forget to run it, and are using software that allows macros, then you can probably define a macro that runs a search/replace and then saves the file. Then bind ctrl-S or whatever the usual shortcut for saving is to that macro, such that whenever you save you also automatically do your search/replacing.
posted by trig at 12:44 PM on April 25

The only suggestion I have is to get some kind of copy-writing job, and have an editor who redlines every single double space. Worked for me.
posted by dbmcd at 12:59 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

The thing that did it for me was getting into web development. HTML eats the extra space and renders it superfluous so there's no reason to do it, and on the coding side I was using monospace fonts that made those two spaces look like a giant hole in the middle of a paragraph any time I looked at HTML source. While you likely don't have a reason to write HTML, I'd suggest that a monospace font for composition might help the use of two spaces look a lot more glaringly obvious and wrong. (Seconding the advice to immediately correct double-spaces as soon as you notice them to help reinforce the training.)
posted by Aleyn at 1:01 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

If you're typing in Word, maybe you could try turning on paragraph marks so you can 'see' yourself doing it as you go? The double spaces will have two dots and single spaces will only have one. That might make it easier to catch when the second dot shows up and looks wrong.
posted by space snail at 1:38 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

This is what autocorrect is for. You can't use that?
posted by scruss at 2:10 PM on April 25

Try an online typing test that gives you auditory and visual cues every time you double space.
posted by Athanassiel at 3:00 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: The bulk of what I write is in outlook emails and teams messages. Not writing documents but quickly and constantly popping off replies. And yes, ageism is one of the factors for my wanting to correct this.
posted by greta simone at 3:13 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

Try this little mental trick, which really helped me make the switch. Think of a period the same way you think a word as you type. You single space after a word, right? Then single space after a period as well. It does take some re-training of that muscle memory - I re-trained myself to single-space after a period following almost 40 years of double-spacing, first learned on an IBM Selectric typewriter (ask your parents, kids) in my high school typing class (yes, that was a thing). So it can be done!

But yeah, just think "the period is just another word. Single space after it. For a while", and before you know it, it will become as second nature to do that as it is to double-space right now.
posted by pdb at 3:25 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

I was going to suggest a whole thought experiment but here's a more direct solution.

Get a free text replacement/expansion app, or maybe one is built into your OS or whatever. Set a shortcut by which " " (double space) turns into "NOPE WRONG" or something like that.

Every time you do it from now on, it will immediately lash you with an annoying and unmissable all-caps message. Watch your habit disappear in a week or two. You can leave that text expansion shortcut active as a threat to yourself.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:17 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

This may sound strange, but what worked for me was when I stopped viewing it as some newfangled "kids these days grumble grumble" thing and started thinking "ooh, isn't this nice? I only have to hit space once!" Basically, when I was going slow enough to notice it, kinda ... enjoying it. And also sort of feeling good about myself for doing it this way. I follow the Style Guide! I keep up with the times!
posted by Spokane at 5:46 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

After decades of not caring, I started to dislike what the double space looked like. Once it started bugging me, it was surprisingly relatively easy to stop. That’s helped me with a few other habits as well — sort of cultivating letting it bother me, which both increases my awareness and motivates me to do something about it.
posted by kite at 5:52 PM on April 25

It sounds like a small reminder just like when a word is misspelled would be the best so (this might depend on what windows, word and outlook versions you have) but you might be able to make windows underline it as a grammar error:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/can-i-set-spell-check-to-auto-correct-two-spaces/04dae173-1160-4020-a8b2-bbb43b7843ad

I have a windows machine at work and now i want to find out for myself tomorrow!

You might also see if something like grammarly can remind you.
posted by Jungo at 6:27 PM on April 25

I don't know if it will help or not, but consider the reasons for single vs. double spacing at the end of a sentence. Typewriters used monospaced fonts...every letter, such as the "l", the "m", the period and the space, took up the same amount of space on the page. The double space made seeing the end of sentences easier. When we all started using computers, we didn't have to use Courier or other monospaced fonts anymore...the space took up just the amount it needed to typographically, and a double space was excessive.

For me, grammar checkers work the rare times I accidentally double space. In Word and Outlook, at least, search-and-replace is your friend until you teach yourself otherwise. I'm too new a Teams user to know it Teams supports search-and-replace in messages, but I also know that most Teams messages are short. It should be easy to go through and correct your double spaces before sending.
posted by lhauser at 7:27 PM on April 25

+1 to BlackLeotardFront's suggestion. It's exactly what I did 10+ years ago and it worked wonderfully. I've completely broken the habit.

I used AutoHotKey with the code below since I already used it for other purposes, but any text expander would work.

; Break the habit of typing two spaces after a period.
:*?:.  ::
  MsgBox No extra space!
return

posted by jaden at 7:49 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

High school and college campus journalism in the 90s is where I learned to stop double-spacing at the end of a sentence.

You may not be on a Mac or an iPhone, but hitting the spacebar twice on an iPhone has produced

.(single space)

for many years.

I think it might be a newer feature in macOS, but it works in any text field.

It doesn't solve your problem of how to train yourself out of doing it, but as others have commented, you can put software to work to do it for you.
posted by emelenjr at 8:31 PM on April 25

Try training yourself to double space - backspace. Changing a behavior to a different one is usually easier than extinguishing one.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:12 AM on April 27

Get a blue tooth shock device, pair it to your computer, make a shortcut app to shock you every time you hit the space bar twice in quick succession.
posted by bkeene12 at 10:28 AM on April 27