I owe most of whatever writing ability I have to my mother, who brutally copy-edited all of my papers throughout my childhood. Whether correctly comma-fying appositives, or matching prepositions in parallel structures, she’d mark up my papers, red pen in hand, and then make me talk through all the corrections with her, one by one.

Frankly, our styles are quite distinct – in fact, she’d likely object to the start of this sentence, on the grounds that ‘distinct’ is an absolute adjective and can’t be modified – and I still hear her voice in my head, chastising me, whenever I end sentences with prepositions, or split infinitives, or make other conscious, conversationally-written choices that run against the most traditional (or, one might say, pedantic) grammar ‘rules.’

But the biggest legacy of her teaching might be my long-standing habit of double-spacing after periods. As she grew up using a typewriter, that habit was deeply ingrained in her own typing. In turn, she passed it along to me, even circling with the aforementioned red pen anywhere I let things slip and single-spaced post-sentence instead.

For years, even as I read typographers’ screeds decrying that double-space practice, I still held onto the idea that it made good sense, a kerning assist to help break one sentence from the next. But, over time, I was slowly swayed by the monospaced vs already-proportionally-spaced font argument. And, by now, I’m certain that single spacing after periods is indeed the correct choice.

Still, like in so many areas of life, there’s a gap between knowing and doing. Especially in a sphere, like touch-typing, that depends so highly on muscle memory. For years, I was saved from myself by technology. For example, WordPress depended on HTML, which automatically collapsed multiple spaces to a single one. And MacOS (like iOS) began to convert double-spaces to periods, so I would catch slip-ups as they occurred.

Still, the Pavlovian conditioning of those MacOS conversions hasn’t appeared to override my years of prior typing. Because even in this very post, I reflexively double-spaced preceding five sentences, INCLUDING THIS VERY SENTENCE. Good grief.

Once WordPress switched to their new Gutenberg editor, it began to preserve (and post) multiples spaces as typed in blog posts. I only realized as much of late. So on top of actively trying to stop double-spacing when I type here, I’ve also been using a quick script to highlight and correct the spots where I slipped up. And, as already evidenced, I wouldn’t say it’s going great.

But, I’m working on it. The road to change is a long and difficult one indeed.