How many spaces should you put after a period?
In this electronic day and age, this editor’s preference is for one space, please.
Hitting the spacebar twice after a period is something a lot of us (of a certain age) learned in school. It’s a hotly debated topic, mostly because it’s a practice that becomes so deeply ingrained that people bristle at the suggestion that they unlearn it.
Putting two spaces after a period is a vestigial practice from the days of monospace typewriter fonts. An extra space was needed to help the eye to differentiate the end of a sentence. The extra space was also used in manuscripts to give proofreaders more room to fit in symbols or remarks.
The proportional fonts and justified margins of modern publishing have made that second space obsolete. One space after a period is the industry standard now for an electronically-submitted manuscript.
(That is to say, if you submit your manuscript to me with two spaces, I’ll be going through and changing it all to one space, myself. Even with macros and shortcuts to automate the process, can I tell you just how much I love doing that?)
For the final word, I direct you to the hallowed Chicago Manual of Style’s ruling on the subject:
[...] Introducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability[...]; (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.
So that’s why!! I had absolutely no idea why people would put two spaces after a full stop. I had never heard of that before and simple thought they were wrong, which it turns out they are. lol.
I was wondering why the speed typing games were penalizing me for the double space after sentences. I was taught to use the double space when I was taught how to type, which means that this is a habit that will take me a long time to break. See, I just did it again…
I was taught two spaces in typing class (back in the 80s). This is gonna take some getting used to and I’m not sure how easy this will be to change unless I enter some sort of automatic edit on my word processor. Otherwise, I’ll continue to proceed with two spaces after each period (which I don’t necessarily consider to be “inefficient” as the article says, because I’d ultimately spend so much time “correcting” each space) :-p
DaltonLynne –
I agree that typing two spaces, going back and deleting one is inefficient: three keystrokes where you only need one! But I’d argue that it’s even less efficient to end up, effectively, paying an editor to hit backspace for you.
It’s the sort of habit that takes a long time to break, but once you’ve retrained your thumbs (or whichever finger you prefer to hit the spacebar with, I suppose!), one keystroke is certainly more efficient than three.