If there is one thing that is constant in the world around us, it’s the fact that things change. This is especially true where technology and software are concerned, and it seems as if Microsoft Word is thrusting one of those changes at us.
For years, Microsoft Word allowed people to have double spaces between sentences and we were all happy. According to The Verge, this is about to change because Microsoft has made the decision they don’t like those double spaces any longer. It didn’t happen all at once and you may have seen the change coming a mile away. It is about to be rolled out on the desktop version of Word, although you can always opt-out of the editor feature if you like.
According to The Verge, a Microsoft partner director of program management, Kirk Gregersen, said: “As the crux of the great spacing debate, we know this is a stylistic choice that may not be the preference for all writers, which is why we continue to test with users and enable these suggestions to be easily accepted, ignored, or flat out dismissed in Editor.”
People have been using two spaces between sentences for quite some time. It really wasn’t all that noticeable on a typewriter, because each letter had the same space allotted to it, leaving narrow letters looking as if they had extra space on either side. Computers have changed that to a certain extent, and many fonts are now proportional, and it seems as if the grammar Nazis are now a little less lenient.
The publishing industry as a whole has been moving toward single space after a period for quite some time. Microsoft is now joining the bandwagon, and if you haven’t already begun to make the change, you may want to start retraining your typing fingers at this point.