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I hate double-spacing.

I never really noticed how much I hated double-spacing until I had to write a research paper for Psychology my first semester of college. Before then, the longest paper I'd written for school had been maybe ten pages. It was about breeding mice for a science project and at the time, I was too caught up in mouse-care duties to really care too much about the paper itself. I wrote it, turned it in, got an A, was done.

This research paper was different. Something like fifteen pages and I agonized over that thing for months, writing several different versions, nitpicking over the formatting. And in the end, after all that work, after all that stress, the finished product looked so... soulless.

The extra space between every line made it look so empty, so lifeless. I can't really explain it, but it bothered me.

I still can't stand double-spacing. I don't know why it was that Psych paper that exacerbated that dislike, because I'd worked with it before. I didn't typically write in double-spacing before, usually just writing in single-spacing, then punching the button to spread it out at the end. Now, what with professors wanting a particular format, I generally work with double-spacing from the beginning, making sure to follow the format as much as possible from the beginning to avoid stress later.

And I hate it. Even if I do work from single-spacing in the beginning and then switch before I print, the print-out always bothers me.

It's a silly thing to get worked-up over, but get worked-up I do. I'm so visually oriented and writing holds such a special place in my psyche that things like that get me rankled. The same part of my brain that does this to me is the one that makes me drool over stacks of books and obsessively read every scrap of text I can get my hands on when I'm eating (for real, I especially can't get through breakfast without something to read). Books with funny margins cause me literal headaches and huge walls of text make my eyes slip up and water.

But double-spacing. Oh that double-spacing.