Depending on when you learned to type, you may have been taught to put two spaces after periods and two spaces after colons. That was good advice in the days of typewriters but it no longer is. Why? Word processing software automatically puts in the extra space that visually separates one sentence from the next and goes between a colon and the text that follows.

What? You say you learned to type in the dark ages of typewriters :-) and putting two spaces after every period is automatic for you…a habit you don’t think you can break? Not a problem. Go ahead and type the way you always have. When you have finished your document, use the find/replace feature of your word processing software. Find every instance of a period and two successive spaces in the document and replace that period and those two spaces with a period and a single space.

--Sigrid Trombley, Wichita Public Schools, Wichita KS

Fran, the answer to this question goes back to the days of using typewriters. With typewriters, the characters are monospaced--e.g., an 'i' takes up the same amount of room as a 'w' or a '.' So two spaces were needed to clearly mark the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. With computers, the amount of space a character takes up varies, and it's easy for the eye to pick out the end of one sentence and the start of another. Hence, using two spaces between sentences is not necessary.

--Joe Wisinski, Adjunct Professor, University of Tampa

The double space in old manual type was required for easier reading. In this age of digital type. The computer automatically adds a slightly larger spacing (about a half times more than the normal character space) after what it perceives is the end of the paragraph. So, using the double space on the computer keyboard creates too large of a space. Some institutions' style guidelines call for two spaces, most don't, and it is an anathema to newspaper editors. I use an e-mail cleaner with a "remove double spaces" when required to make a submitted article usable.

--From Parker's Pen, Southern Nevada, USA

I think "as if" (and as though) is used to talk about the so-called hypothetical situations, that is, situations that are unreal or contrary to fact, as when you say 'He treats me as if I were his enemy'. These situations always imply the opposite of what one says. The above example implies that I am not his enemy. It is often argued that the same thing holds true for expressions like 'I wish' , or 'if only', for if a person says "I wish I were rich", s/he implies "I am not rich".

--S.Maliki, Casablanca, Morocco