Please, Unlearn Putting 2 Spaces at the End of Every Sentence

My time in high school and college happened a long time ago, but let's be fair, it wasn't that long ago. Or, was it?

High School graduation was in 1982 for me, and while I wasn't the best student, I do have a clear memory of certain rules that were required to be followed. My daughter is now in college and when I offer to edit one of her papers for errors it always seems to turn into a heated debate over rules she's never heard of.

I used to know how to type properly, but, when I entered radio and had to type news, the station had an old dusty manual Remington Typewriter that had to be pounded on in order to get the ink to show up on the paper. That's when I learned to type quickly and aggressively with two fingers, sadly something that's stuck with me over the years. I tend to wear out keyboards.

I remember "ibid" which was a term used to repeat a source without having to type it all over again multiple times in a term paper. Nobody knows what ibid is today. I also remember when liquid White Out was my delete button, so to speak, and sometimes with multiple errors, white covering liquid paint had to be "caked" on. Often times, it was more of a mess-maker than a correction tool.

I grew up in the beginning of the personal computer world and I really didn't have much interest in them until the 80s. However, schools were actually using computers much earlier in some fashion, and because of early com puter limitations, students and teachers would have to label some things differently in order to make the system work. One example was the letter "R" which was the abbreviation for "Thursday." Still today, when I abbreviate the days of the week it's: S, M, T, W, R, F, Sa. Whenever I use the R, it always prompts a conversation that usually ends with people thinking I made the whole thing up. Yes, it really was a thing.

The other rule that I've been told to erase from my memory is the double space at the end of every sentence rule. We were specifically taught in typing class to put two spaces after every sentence. Today, that rule is no longer the proper thing to do. According to Wikipedia, this began during the 20th Century when typewriters started to become the norm. The additional space after a sentence was there to mimic typesetters, which used a larger space to signify the end and beginning of a sentence. It was an aesthetics rule that became outdated as modern typewriters and computers became the norm.  Today, we obviously no longer follow that rule, however, the older I get, the more I find that old habits die hard.