Spaced Out

Despite what you learned in typing class, stop using two spaces after a period. It’s nothing more than a habit – one worth breaking. ("Curious things, habits,” Agatha Christie wrote in “Witness for the Prosecution.” “People themselves never knew they had them.”) The practice of double spacing after a period is a holdover from the days when typewriters had “monofaced” type, meaning fonts in which every letter had exactly the same width (in other words, “m” used the same amount of space as “i”). Because of the monoface font, two spaces after a period made it easier to see where one sentence ended and another began. Today, however, most fonts we typically use are proportionally spaced, meaning that characters take up an amount of space relative to their actual width (the “i” uses less space than the “m”), so that double spacing after periods is not only unnecessary, it mars the look of your text by scattering it with small gaps. Books, magazines, brochures, newspaper, desktop publishing, etc., use only one space after a period, as do both AP style and The Chicago Manual of Style. Courier is one of the very few fonts occasionally used today that is still monoface. This is Courier.  And, as you can see, its spacing does seem awkward, which renders it not as easy to read as the Lucida Grande font in which the rest of this post appears.  The characters all take the same amount of space.  That’s why two spaces between sentences made sense when Christie wrote “Witness” in 1933 but does not make sense for us in 2007.  Times change.  Technology evolves.  So should we.

 

Note: I know there are people and clients who insist on the two-space rule – arguments for doing so include “I’ve always done it that way,” “I’m still totally hot for Miss Shapiro, my 7th grade typing instructor,” and “I want to annoy Dan Santow” – but if for no other reason than it makes text harder to read, and so less advantageous to ourselves and to those our clients are trying to reach, it’s a practice worth stopping.

If for some reason you’re incapable of typing any other way, at least do a search and replace on documents when you’re done. In Word:

• click control/h
• click twice at “find what” and once at “replace with”
• click “replace all”

Comments

[icecream]

you are all crazy.clearly no spaces is best.we find here a happy medium in that sentences are very obviously separated, while still avoiding seas of white space.its the way of the future.

[John Jamieson]

Uuch, Lazy cost cutting practices from the printing industry are now being pushed down our necks? The double space does indeed add white space (a good thing), and does break the flow a tad (also good, there is a reason for the stop).

It is amazing how used people become to abuses of language or typesetting, and then it is accepted as normal, even preferred!

While the value of double spaces after a stop can be argued by average readers, it is valued by many speed readers and people with dyslexia.

[kirk]

Thanks Dan. The past few months I've been going back and forth between one and two spaces. Some of my coworkers didn't believe me.

I think the one space looks cleaner and more concise especially in this day and age when we have to pack more into less.

[Anon]

What are you guys talking about? My adviser scolded me every time whenever he didn't see two spaces after a period (Yes, this was in 2006). I had so many copies of my masters thesis. Those were the days of Word, now I have moved on to LaTex, and two spaces or one space it will look awesome. (It'll ignore the whitespace and just give appropriate spacing)

[Hank Lay]

Thanks for the history lesson. My daughter-in-law, a teacher, sent me the link, and I immediately added your site to my Favorites list. I've wondered why most publications these days ignore the two-space rule. (Our local paper goes overboard: their "Justify" function often removes spaces between several words in a row!) I'm such an old fogy, though, that I still find it easier to read paragraphs in which the sentences are set apart by that extra space. A hard habit to break. And how about colons? I've always used two spaces after these, but only one after semicolons. BTW, are you using Courier in this "Comments:" box? It seems awkward. I'd prefer Arial.

[Latigo]

Worrying about whether you use 2 spaces after a period or 1 space is a totally ridiculous concern. How much more anal and politically can we get in this country than this kind of stupidity? It's one thing to use the spacing as a printer's format and another to penalize people whoa re writers with ideas.

What's more important than spaces is the ideas in the sentences not the number of spaces between them. If one learned keyboarding or typing with 2 spaces and was told doing otherwise is an "error" it's a very difficult habit to break. It is an automatic reflex for good typists.
The original keyboardng
classes taught this technique and it's still taught in many cases.

Finally, 1 space positions the two sentences so close physically that they can be read as run-on's or as fused sentences, and their ideas will run together when they shouldn't.

[Susie]

I was always taught to double-space after a period until I was in graduate school for writing and publishing. My copyediting teacher informed us that we had been doing it wrong and it is correct to use only one space. It was actually an easy habit to break and now I cringe when I see two!

[Christina]

So glad to see this explained so succinctly - this is an ongoing argument/debate I have with my co-workers, who all add in extra spaces.

Bookmarked this for future use. >:)

[Rachel]

This post shows what a major generation gap there is when it comes to technology. My family had a PC when I was four, and I grew up at every level of school (starting in elementary) with computers--not a typewriter in sight! Thankfully, I never learned to hit space twice.

[Cat]

Oh thank you for printing this. This has been a pet peeve of mine for many years now. Many did not believe me when I told them they didn't need to do this anymore. I will definitely be passing out the permalink to this.

Hugs!!!

[diandra]

well, sadly, in the ivory tower it's still a two space world (esp. in the arts).

[Webmaster Chick]

I agree with Angela. It drives me nuts trying to read articles and blog posts online when the author doesn't use the double spacing method. The text is already so small on some sites (Ctrl + is my friend), why make it more difficult to read? Just because you don't *need* to use two spaces doesn't mean you shouldn't!

[Adam875]

I'm firmly in the 2-space camp as well, from a style standpoint, not a habit one. I just think text looks cramped with only one space between sentences. The extra white space helps tell the reader to stop and take a breath. Yes, the period does that, but for me, visually, the space provides nice backup. Especially when reading on a screen (where, by your argument, it should matter even less!), I find documents with single spaces after periods look crowded and tire my eyes quickly.

[Carrie]

boo hoo! I am going to have to change. You are right and convincing and I am sad to lose that comfortable little habit.

[Ponygirl]

Isn't the English language, both grammatical and punctually full of anachronistic behaviors? Why is the double space where we are drawing the line in the sand and taking a stand?

I personally like the double space. I think it adds a formality to the beginning of a sentence.

My question is: is it wrong or simply no longer needed?

[rache]

i admit i probably will not be dedicating much time to unlearning my two-space habit. but i'm curious, because we were also taught to put one space after a comma, one after a semi-colon, and two after a colon. is that also now considered incorrect?

[jenny]

Wait--your reasoning for not using two spaces is that two spaces doesn't look as good, yet when someone wants to use two spaces, because they like how it looks, that's not a good enough reason? That's kind of bunk. I am all for rules because of clarity, but, like the Harvard comma, I think this is more of a personal preference thing.

[Andy]

I am another who was taught to use the two spaces, and it just comes naturally to me that way. So that now, after using two spaces for so long, I would fight to the bitter death anyone who tried to force me to stop. It's weird the things you can feel an allegiance towards.