What if the cult of single spacing had taken half the energy spent snidely mocking those who haven’t heard, and redirected that toward actually spreading the word?! Particularly to teachers?!

1) Sentences are separate thoughts and should have a visible divider between them, different from words and paragraphs. Words have a single space for a divider; paragraphs have a blank line for a divider. Even chapters have a divider, a new page. Should not sentences have their own separate divider?

2) Reading should flow, but the phrases (or sentences) should stand apart, not run together. As mentioned above, scanning is difficult with single spaced sentences. In my opinion, sentences with punctuation in the middle would flow better with a double space at the end of the sentence, regardless of fixed-width or proportional spacing. Are there some here who believe the flow is better without sentence separation?

3) Sentence parsing would not require A.I. as all sentences would have a different separator from the internal punctuation. HTML is partly to blame with its auto white space removal. Even so, I believe laziness is probably high on the list of reasons for this change; at least next to the space savings in news print.

This is all my opinion, and yes, I am old school and have used two spaces between sentences since my day one. I guess you could say I have a hard time making the change…or it could be that my eyes are getting old enough that sentence separation is clearer with two spaces.

I agree with the above poster that multiple spaces are not to be used for formating, e.g. centering text, etc., Learn and use tabs.

language and style will continue to change, although, not necessarily for the better. i keep expecting sentence case to disappear one day, lol. now is that for the better, or a result of laziness? does it make this paragraph easier to read? and i have saved some space too!

As far as I know, all modern word processing programs let you type as many spaces as you like. If you type ten spaces between sentences, it’ll print big wide spaces. This is, of course, utterly stupid. The sensible thing to do would be to recognize the ends of sentences and use an appropriate amount of space — it wouldn’t care how many spaces you typed; if you typed two or ten or a thousand, it would still use the same amount of sentence-ending space.

However, in order to recognize the end of a sentence, the software would require more than one space (because full stops sometimes occur mid-sentence, in abbreviations, etc.; unaided determination of end-of-sentence would require human-level language processing ability, for perfect accuracy), so that futuristic word processor I’m describing would not do the right thing if you only typed one space (except in special cases where sentence-ending space is the same as inter-word space (“French spacing”) — but even then, it would lose in the line-breaking algorithm: end of sentence is a better break point than arbitrary inter-word space)

Upshot of which: if you want to have a hope in Hades of producing good-looking output (which no modern word processor is even close to being capable of), you must double-space!