Back in high school typing class (the most useful class of my secondary education, I might add), we were taught to double space after every sentence.

Now, 20+ years later, I spend a lot of time undoing that practice. Not for me; I stopped double spacing between sentences years ago. But for my clients. Anyone who is my age or older must have had the same typing teacher I did!

Now that typewriters are obsolete, and our fonts are porportioned correctly, we no longer need to double space to set off our sentences. In fact, it looks weird if you do it. (see the example on that page). It also creates formatting issues, and wastes precious character limitations on microblogging sites like Twitter.

If you can, break the double spacing habit. If you can’t, go to the “find” feature in Word and hit the spacebar twice. Then “find” and it will find all the instances of double spacing. But don’t do an auto search and replace. Sometimes you need a double space–mostly after colons. In time, you will probably tire of this step and break the habit during the writing process!