Non breaking space between two words is ˝too wide˝.

I would love to know how to stop sentences from ending with a 1/2/3 letter word. I usually do a soft return or put a non-breaking space between the word and the next one so it will drop down by virtue of being a larger combined two words.

The answer is almost always "make a clever paragraph style" when it comes to using InDesign. In addition to putting in my favorite numbers for Hyphenation and Justification (read about it here) you can add a GREP Style that forbids last lines of paragraph shorter than x-number of characters:

A GREP style within the Paragraph Style:

Find What: .{16}$

Change To: Format: NoBreak Character Style

This causes InDesign to passively take notice of the last 16 characters of the paragraph and apply a Character Style that has one simple attribute turned on: No Break. The result? You cannot have a last line with fewer than 16 characters on it. Hence, no runt last lines. You can substitute whatever number of characters you want if 16 isn't a good example number for you.

Could someone explain me what we're talking about! ... I don't see at all the relationship between the answers given and the question asked! ...

Michel, it is called "making a wild guess" until you rule out other factors.

after I've finished hand ragging my paragraphs

Armadillo, a well designed paragraph style (with my favorite numbers for H&Js) should make hand-adjustments quite rare. In addition to the Justification numbers I mentioned above, better Hyphenation numbers are 9 / 3 / 4 / 1 / 1p6 / off / off / off / and Align Left.

Barb, I never was good at paying close attention!

Geez, Mike, I thought this was your way of telling us you were terminally ill. Brings me back to you earnestly saying "Where's the Start Menu?" to me way back in the 90s.

Armadillo77, Expounding on Jeff's answer... if you have already added all the non-breaking spaces, you could use GREP find/change to locate the words on either side of the non-breaking space and add the non-break character style, then come back through and replace the non-breaking space with regular spaces.

For example:

([\l\u]+) ([\l\u]+) will find a word on either side of a non-breaking space, along with the space. Replace with the no break character style.

Then, you could cycle back and replace the non-breaking spaces with regular spaces, using GREP again, or just a simple Text Find/Change.

~Barb

I'm not a big fan of Non-breaking spaces, because the words on either side of the Non-Breaking Space could hyphenate. Kind of defeats the purpose

Try using a regular space, then select the two words on either side of  the space and under of Options menu of the Character panel, choose No Break. You can set this up as a Character Style to apply again and again.

What paragraph alignment is applied to it? What are the H and Js?