The new rule is being rolled out slowly across Word, meaning that users may not encounter the new warning until they update their software. This is outrageous. Absolutely delighted that Microsoft word is now marking two spaces after the full stop as errors. About bloody time. Expect to see the new changes in Word roll out to everyone in the coming months. Congratulations, fellow one-spacers. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Cybersecurity Mobile Policy Privacy Scooters. Phones Laptops Headphones Cameras. Tablets Smartwatches Speakers Drones. Accessories Buying Guides How-tos Deals. W ould yo us ay th is tex t is com forta ble to read? There is no good argument to use it and there are great arguments against it.
Arguments on functionality, mostly. Some mention the double space is necessary to divide sentences, but this is absolutely ludicrous.
This is the very reason the use of uppercase letters at the beginning of a sentence became standardized. How many different principles do you want to add to distinguish between sentences? At one point is it enough? It took centuries to define what works best. Without a doubt you will find the use of double spaces frequently throughout history, but there is a reason it never became standardized.
It goes against the principles of proper typography. The point is not that the single space has been standardized for centuries, but that there is a need for standardization.
They adopted the practice of proportional fonts into monospace fonts, rather than the other way around. NOT a double space. Have you ever heard of the en-dash and em-dash? Whereas we incorrectly use hyphens for just about everything, the hyphen is only meant to hyphenate words or to combine words.
The only exception I can think of is to divide the numbers in a date notation. To signify a range in numbers or a correlation between two locations an en-dash should be used and to signify a sentence within a sentence, one would have to use the em-dash. Em-dashes often tend to be too obtrusive. Some typefaces feature shorter or thinner em-dashes.
If your typeface features a rather obtrusive em-dash, it may be best to use an en-dash instead and use half spaces around it.
Does that make a single space the preferred practice? Do you find that to be logical? Recent or not, it has become standardized. The discussion might stop there, especially after giving all the reasons for why it has been standardized.
Earlier printers had advice to deal with the situations where the holes became too numerous or looked bad. Perhaps so. Historically there have been a lot of typographic disasters which nevertheless were common practice.
Sometimes a new technology comes along which imposes certain restrictions on us and so there is a temporary fallback, but as technology improves the typographic sophistication returns. I talk with typographers and type designers regularly and I think there are very few who would argue for double spaces, especially considering historically one and a half space was preferred and not a double space. These are not the kind of people who blindly follow standards; these are the people who help set the standards.
We typographers are the ones making the rules on typography. Let me close by repeating one sentiment. Not only was the double space never standardized or used predominantly in any historical period, but in fact historically the preferred space was around the width of the letter M.
A double space is two Ns, which is simply too big. Do you really need more than that? And regardless of historical use, the fact is that most of us consider the handling of double spaces to be aesthetically displeasing and unprofessional. In other words, we have more or less standardized the single space, so stop being a rebel for the sake of it.
You can convince me to leave out the space after a period, mainly because the computer makes it look okay. See I do it too.
And if you are using a French word-processor program, it will automatically put the spaces before a colon, a semi-colon, an exclamation point, a question mark, and a quote mark. Anyhow the computer works it out. That is so interesting, Paula. I never knew that. Anyone else out there grow up under that same rule? There are two separate debates: the one about whether people should be continuing to press the space bar once or twice in the age of digital fonts, and whether we actually want to use much longer spaces after the ends of sentences than we do between words.
In the former, pretty much the entire publishing industry is agreed that only one space is the way to go. In the latter, I kind of have a fondness for this kind of thing:. I hate to admit it and I will deny it if anyone says I admitted it! However, I find it hard to find the end of a sentence in typed material nowadays. Often when I read Time magazine for example, I zing past the end of the sentence, forcing me to reread in order to figure out what is going on.
I blame it on my aging eyes. Bring back the two spaces! For me, this is an accessibility issue. Another interesting point. Also, I feel you on the aging eyes thing: I have 4 separate pairs of reading glasses! I was probably out of college a decade before that happened. You may find that many people still do it because they were taught it during typing class. After that, we were on our own. Well, this is interesting, because ideally I think we should use 1,5 space after a period.
I have to wonder if, as technology advances, we will reintroduce the 1,5 space. Oh, dear. Try as you might, you will NOT convince me to stop using double spaces between sentences. Sort of. I mean, really. I love them. Some people thought it was pretty funny. You may not. You ARE welcome! I love ellipses and emphasizing with CAPS!
And I just read that post and I most definitely approve of the word punctuationally. So the irritation is just aesthetic. At all.
I can have fun with formatting. That first one was shouted and the second one was whispered…. Language is such an important tool and we should use it with joy. And I worship them. Nice talking to you — both of your sites look fantastic. I will be visiting. I hope you come back here, too! The irritation for me is that there is an increased sense of awareness at the end of a sentence when a double space has been utilized.
Good typography is invisible. I feel the discussion could actually end there. It simply diminishes the reading experience even if extra spaces would divide things more clearly. Typography is about the flow of things, not about division. I absolutely love the use of em-dashes and semicolons, but the em-dash is actually a very obtrusive element. Thank you, Jennifer. Readers are too impatient, We have to grab them and keep them.
Still, I do have to fight to stay loose. I want it to be right! Whatever the final ruling on spacing is, no one should be pressing the spacebar twice after a sentence. Either way, take the manual work out of it and let the computers do it for us.
Many of us use abbreviations in our writing. My iphone does that and its super annoying. Burn the extra calories pressing the space bar twice. It CAN be done, but then the type designers need to address this and technology needs to advance a bit further.
With OpenType functionality you can add a lot of advanced features in your typeface which the end user can utilize. OT functionality is also slowly being implemented into websites, but it will take a while before it becomes standardized in our browsers or on our computers.
I can and I do. I absolutely enjoy hitting the space bar twice. I write for a living and few things make me angrier than one space after a sentence. Using one space after the period makes all of the sentence bleed together. For a quick reader, two spaces helps distinguish between a comma signifying a pause vs. It is similar to the way that street signs are designed differently so that you know the meaning without ever reading them.
STOP signs are a red hexagon. Yield signs are yellow triangles. To distinguish between sentences we use capital letters which were initially not used in combination with lowercase but it became practice to distinguish between sentences more , a period AND a space. And still you need more to distinguish? If I apply this to your traffic sign analogy, I suppose we would be building colorful fences around traffic signs to emphasize that a traffic sign is there. This is a moment of increased awareness of the typography while good typography should be invisible.
Look at my previous posts on this page for elaborate explanations. Which is exactly why we need more space after a sentence than between words: there SHOULD be a slight pause between sentences! When reading aloud, I find I will miss the slight pause that should be there, continuing to the next sentence too quickly. When reading quickly, the same thing happens, and I find I have to go back and re-read at least part of the sentence to understand what it says before going on.
It slows me down greatly and makes it much more difficult to comprehend the text well. Ironically enough, I find it most problematic online when reading html which strips out double spaces , only partially because I am often scanning quickly online.
That looks okay too. But most of my students pay little to no attention to how many spaces they sue between sentences. I routinely get essays from about half my students that have a variable number of spaces between sentences, sometimes as many as four, but often three.
That attitude comes from not really having any investment in their writing beyond what grade it earns, and they know through experience that most English teachers are too busy to spend much, if any, time fussing with them over typography, nor to hold them accountable for it in the form of a grade.
So they learn not to care about it. The basic purpose of all spelling, punctuation and typographic rules is to promote clarity of communication by avoiding confusion and ambiguity. So, why the overbearing, scolding tone? Hi John. I would argue, though, that certain conventions serve a greater purpose than simple clarity. After years of teaching English and professional work as a copy editor, I can tell you most errors I marked caused zero confusion in terms of meaning.
But when someone takes the time to get these things right, they convey more than clarity; they convey professionalism.
They tell me they are a person who bothers with those kinds of details. There is a kind of kinship between people who care about the details in any given field. And sometimes people who share that particular kinship want to make a little noise. No harm intended, though. The world has way bigger problems than this. Jennifer…I think the main thing is just to be consistent with whichever choice you make.
By your reasoning I may as well add three spaces because it promotes clarity of communication while keeping the meaning the same.
If justified text is typographically less good due to a greater variety in spacing, then at least on a very subtle level adding two spaces after periods will have a similar effect. The use of a semicolon, an ellipsis or an em-dash can completely change the tone of the text and actually change meaning, and so can spaces, At the very least it creates a pause, which in itself has meaning.
Spacing absolutely can create confusion and ambiguity, and it can also solve it. A period might be the end of a sentence, but it might also follow initials, abbreviations, numbers, and other uses. A period followed by two spaces solves a real problem with ambiguity.
This is especially useful in the modern age i. Also let me say that all this talk about typographers is nonsense. Typographers as a group have no particular opinion on the issue. That kept me laughing all the way down! As a definitely over 40, I also did typing at school, though never learnt to do the double spacing.
What I was eternally grateful for though, was the decline of shorthand classes at that exact time! Was not at all passionate about such a class, so I was relieved when it was outed. I do double spaces to improve readability. Single pixel periods are not the most visible graphic conceived. As for typewriters, I never used them for anything but play. I am over 40 but have used computers since a very young age. Distinguishing between a comma and a period is easier with two spaces after a period.
Early 40 column displays did not have this issue as the font was so very large. Sadly, not everyone has the same literacy level I do. All your ranting just shows that you are the one behind the times. How lovely to be able to put a young whipper-snapper in her place. Clearly, I am over It is only a number and, hopefully, affords me some sort of respectability, at least for longevity.
But I do double space after the punctuation of a sentence. The theory that placing extra spacing at the end of a sentence originated with the advent of the typewriter and its monotype spaced fonts has been around for years, but I believe it is wrong. The tradition of placing extra spacing after periods and other end-of-sentence punctuation marks is much, much older.
Indeed there are examples to be found in the books of the incunabula. Bembo, published by Aldus Manutius, Although there was not a fixed practice using extra spacing after periods during the early centuries of printing, it is not difficult to find examples in every age.
By the 19th century the practice was firmly established. Pick up almost any book from that era and you will find the extra spacing.
So I submit that the early typists were simply following the practice that was common in their day. Whether or not it is a practice that should be continued is a separate question. Comtempory book publishers have universally abandoned the practice, and I suspect that this abandoment will continue to spread.
Frankly, issues like this irk me. The main people perpetrating this myth are the something college journalist students. So, then they become 2-space Nazis, trying to bully their opinion on everyone else in the world.
Reading some of these posts, two spaces has historically been the rule far longer than any recent one-space trend. We should not change history because of technology unless it is a really big win. In this case, I think people are just becoming lazy. With more high-tech typing devices like mobile phones and tablets, people are typing with their thumbs, typing while driving bad idea or typing so quickly to get a quick message out that quality suffers.
While single spaces separate words, I think double spaces should separate sentences, it reinforces that the thought sentence is complete. It helps it stand out and I think it reinforces clearer writing, clearer reading and clearer sentence construction.
Also, carriage returns breaks, new lines, line feeds, or whatever should separate paragraphs, for the same reasons. These are the building blocks of written communication and they should each have their own unique separator. My wife is from Thailand, and the Thai written language has no punctuation.
It also has no spaces between words, sentences or paragraphs. It just just one, constant flow of uninterrupted text. Or in Thai — itisjustoneconstantflowofuninterruptedtext — super annoying. Any direction we move closer to this even as subtle as changing double spaces to singe spaces is a move in the wrong direction! Historically about 1,5 space was used. It closes, divides and opens.
Do you require so much emphasis on the division? It creates unnecessary pauses and an increased awareness of the typography while good typography should be invisible. I would absolutely prefer not to read a whole book with double spaces, just like I would absolutely prefer not to read a book set in a Didone typeface or with too much leading or with too much letter- or word spacing and I could name more typographic principles.
Do you know how they feel about it? I suppose if they thought adding spaces is desirable, it would have been standardized a long time ago. The Thai script consists of icons which are more or less the same height and width. In Latin writing we have a lot of variety in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions, so we do need to divide to make our text easier to interpret.
Also, I suspect the Thai script denotes whole words and not letters. When one icon represents a whole word, there is lesser need for spaces. I still find the Thai script to be unusual though, as other Asian languages do seem to use spaces despite having icons which are the same height. The period, space, and use of a capital letter are not unique to the end of a sentence, and apply identically to serial capitalized abbreviations. In the case of those abbreviations, would you say that the completion of the sentence was already reinforced, even though the period, space, and capitalization does not denote the end of the sentence?
You are dismissive of the rationales behind clearer division, but you have not provided cogent counter-reasoning. You seem to realize that the not-currently-an-option 1.
Two spaces, plain and simple, makes it MUCH easier to read anything anyone has written. I agree that there are many more important things to worry about, and having written this post, I was surprised by the number of people who feel so strongly about sticking to two spaces. Read my lengthy comments on this page to get more insight into the matter. How do you know?
Do we really need to cater to the business people who are only using double spaces because they grew up with the typewriter? We simply need to do proper research before we write such articles.
The fact that there are many more important things going on in the world is absolutely besides the point. We all have our own professions and we all try to make progress in our fields.
Whether a single or a double space is handled after a period is absolutely relevant to typographers. We are the ones who establish these conventions and some of us do research in the psychological impact of typographic practices. We are simply trying to make language more accessible. We are improving communication, which is at the core of everything else in the world. If typographic progress were irrelevant we would still be drawing stick figures on walls to communicate.
It does matter. Jennifer—i respect your right to use one space. I do, however, take issue with three things about your post. The first, and by far the most important, is your support of the denigration of older people. We live in an era of age discrimination.
Your post, and your follow up comments, state that the reason people incorrectly in your view use two spaces after a full stop is because they are old, ignorant, and stuck in their old ways. This is offensive. Is this really what you want the teachers who look to you for advice to be teaching their students? As shown by many of your comments, there was no reason to link age with the use of two spaces. Second, and implied in the first, the absolutism of your article is just silly. Reference the comments above.
Third, so far as i can see, the move to one space in certain quarters was based upon aesthetics. I think aesthetics are important. But, in writing, I think aesthetics—in the sense of how words appear visually on the page, whether they look pretty or not—must take second billing to the need for clear expression. As many of the commenters and their referenced sources note, the separation of sentences—complete thoughts—by two spaces and words within sentences by one space aids in understanding, clarity and readability.
But to elevate aesthetics, as practiced by magazine publishers, above clear expression again seems unworthy of a person teaching pedagogy.
Brief point of interest related to the age issue: in , when you were learning to type on an IBM Selectric, I had already been using personal computers and word processing software to write and edit for a national publication for several years. I have not used a typewriter since except occasionally to type an envelope when printers were still not very good at it.
Just because i am over 55 does not mean I am backwards or do not understand the latest technology. Thanks for taking the time to comment. I do feel genuinely sorry for having offended anyone. Being over 40 myself, I felt it was okay to poke a little fun.
But I am realizing now that because technology is moving so fast, the fear of being out of touch is very real — and can have serious consequences — for anyone who might be considered of an advanced age. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the relationship between how a message is delivered and how receptive your audience will be to hearing it. I hope to formulate what I have learned here into a lesson I can share in a later post.
Then there are those who are old. They grew up with certain technologies with their very specific set of restrictions and so these people created certain routines to work with those restrictions or perhaps work around them.
Technology advances, but not all people grow with the time. The fact that a lot of older people use double spaces is evidence of that. And that brings me to people who are stuck in their ways. Despite the fact most of us know close to nothing about typography, I see a lot of passionate reactions here from people who argue double spaces are absolutely better while the typographic community actually advises against it.
I believe she was very clear about that. Years ago I would do a lot of website coding and so I would be pretty up to date with the latest innovations regarding CSS coding for example. Now my attention shifted to print and type design. I can still code and actually have an advantage there compared to my classmates at the art academy since most of them have yet to learn coding. One has to do a lot more research into the history of typography and practices today to write a well-informed article on the matter.
However, her article does align with what the typographic community thinks, which is that double spaces after periods are not recommended. Never have. Mr Douglas found more solace in the fact that the benefits of two spacing, as described in the study, appear to be very minor. The majority of one spacers, on the other hand, read at pretty much the same speed either way.
And reading comprehension was unaffected for everyone, regardless of how many spaces followed a period. The major reason to use two spaces, the researchers wrote, was to make the reading process smoother, not faster. Everyone tended to spend fewer milliseconds staring at periods when a little extra blank space followed it.
Putting two spaces after a comma, if you are wondering, slowed down reading speed, so do not do that. But no sooner did the paper publish than the researchers discovered that science does not necessarily govern matters of the space bar. Ms Johnson told Lifehacker that she and her co-authors submitted the paper with two spaces after each period — as was proper. And the journal deleted all the extra spaces anyway.
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