When it comes to Microsoft Office users, there are the single-spacers and the double-spacers. No matter what side of the line you fall on, your world is about to change. And if you happen to support single spacing, you’re in for a real treat.
Microsoft Word will start identifying double spaces between sentences as an error. Yes, finally, it’s going to happen.
According to The Verge, the massive company has just begun testing the edit on their desktop version of Microsoft Word, which is widely used across the globe. Eventually, the new feature will be rolled out to all users of the famous platform.
https://twitter.com/brfreed/status/149681714279624704
Luckily for double-spacers, there will be a way to opt out of the error through Microsoft’s Editor feature. Kirk Greger, who serves as a Microsoft partner director of program management, delved into the double-spacing debate.
Greger 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.”
So why do some people insist on hitting the space bar twice after the end of a sentence? Well, some of the blame falls on typewriters. Because narrow letters have a ton of extra space, it made it difficult to distinguish whether a new sentence had begun or whether it was extra space from a tiny letter. As a result, people began typing two spaces after every period and inadvertently forming their own cult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpZX3geBNrM
However, the single space protocol has become standard across the publishing industry. And so, if you’re one of the many double-spacing advocates, Microsoft Office will help you break that bad habit.