Please stop double spacing. I’m fairly certain the entire practice, while not intended to be as such, is downright ableist (that isn’t to say its users are ableist, mind, just that the practice was invented without any thought to the disabled). I realize this habit is deeply ingrained in people who learned to type using typewriters, and I’m asking those people to consider the following, and think about trying to unlearn it. This is in no way me saying you’re doing anything wrong, or that you have to change your behavior. You absolutely do not have to, but I think you should at least be aware, y’know?
If you know me at all, even in passing, you may not be aware, as I write now and have since I was quite young, but I’m dyslexic. Quite severely, in fact: when I was going into school initially, so about five or so, if you put a word that had three or more letters in front of me, I would quite literally run the other direction, hide, and refuse to come out until I was promised I wouldn’t have to look at it.
Dyslexia is something that’s different for everyone. While I received specialized schooling to help me learn to read and write, I still do have symptoms of dyslexia (and no one has all the same symptoms, we’re all different) that are just normal parts of my life. I mix up words in speech and typing, I have what I call in-brain autocorrect, and I am incapable of writing the letter Z if it’s not in cursive, which is odd, because I don’t write in straight up cursive (my handwriting is kind of a mix of cursive and print; some letters are cursive, and some are just print that connects to other letters).
One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I need uniformity with the text or it pulls me out of it. My brain has to work twice as hard to read text that isn’t uniform. If there are more spaces between a period and the next sentence than there are elsewhere in the text, it’s not exactly illegible to me, but it’s so difficult to read that 99.9% of the time, I’m not going to even attempt it. I can if I have to, but if it’s longer than a paragraph or two and I have a choice, or it’s not a very interesting topic, I’m not gonna. Reading is something our brains have to work harder at than most people’s do, and more effort than we’re used to is extremely unpleasant, and can even remind us of the trauma of learning to read in the first place (I genuinely cannot imagine it just… not being traumatic for someone, that shit hurts). This isn’t unique to me, many dyslexic people experience this.
So while the way you learned to type may have been standard, it actively prevents dyslexic people like me from being willing to reading it, or even able to do so without discomfort. Seriously, I’m just not going to engage with it at all the vast majority of the time. I have muted authors on AO3 exclusively because they double space. I have unfollowed people here on tumblr because of it, too. Not out of malice or dislike, but because it legitimately hurts my brain to read what they type. It could be a god-tier fic or my best friend in the world’s tumblr account and I’m still not gonna read it.
Again, this doesn’t mean you have to change anything you do. You don’t, and I don’t mind if you choose to continue as you have been. But as a writer, I’d want to know if a practice like that was alienating people who might otherwise read my work. So I’m sharing my experience.
