Double-spacing, if the thing is an electronic file that’s going to be poured into a typesetting file, can screw things up. Although most of them will just take out the extra spaces automatically (I think InDesign does–I know it changes the quotes).
If you’re typing your masterpiece on an old Olivetti, by all means put in the spaces, because someone’s either going to scan it for typesetting purposes or not. It’ll be fixed. If you’re trying to fake a document purportedly typed decades ago, put those spaces in for sure.
Hard returns though, just don’t even get me started. They are a royal PITA.
The purpose of the double space is to distinguish a period at the end of sentence from a period used for an abbreviation. This is even more important in electronic files. It’s impossible to get an accurate sentence count in a document with single spaces between sentences. Single spacing is objectively wrong.
This is hilarious. There is no “objectively,” only conventions. If you’re writing for a particular publication, follow their style. Chicago Manual of Style does one space. AP does one space. APA recently changed to two spaces for drafts. Canadian style says one space. The EU style guide says one space. Oxford style calls for one space. University of Cambridge calls for one space, etc. Modern typesetters also seem to prefer a single space, as evidenced by the quotes from the Wikipedia article above:
That said, there is no “objective” right or wrong here. Double spacing may make it easier to get accurate sentence counts using very basic software, I suppose. That doesn’t make it objectively right, or anything. You can also end every sentence with a special character if you wanted accurate sentence counts. It’s all just convention, and convention that is based somewhat on professional designers’ subjective judgments of aesthetics and “readability.”
I’m officially an old person now, and use two spaces because that is what God intended us to do. Certain applications (like this here forum software) that don’t like double-spacing will ignore the second space anyway, so I figure I’m not hurting anything.
Periods in monospace fonts carry a ton of space with them and arguably don’t need the double space. Periods in proportional fonts provide an additional amount of space about two ‘periods’ wide. There is no possible rational argument that two spaces are more necessary in a monospaced font than in a proportional font - at least no such argument that is based on the idea that we like using spacing to detect the end of sentences.
For myself, single spacing the end of sentences visibly exacerbates the “wall of text” phenomena, making the text less pleasant to read. It’s not invisible.
I double-space after a period because that’s how I was taught and trained, but if the software I’m using edits it back down to one I don’t stress about it.
Okay, so I was reading this and was astonished to discover that the argument apparently (at least for some) is that the space after punctuation should not be visually larger than the space between words.
Heck, they seem to be arguing that the spaces between words and after commas should be smaller than normal between-word spaces, because hell-if-I-know, apparently they find paper to be really expensive and don’t want to spend a single micrometer on increased clarity (because visual clarity is “visually disruptive”).
I suppose if a person were to take that position, that double spacing is bad because single spacing is bad because there really shouldn’t be any space at all if we can possibly get away with omitting it, then, well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about whether they’re complete morons. But it’s worth noting that I’ve never heard this argument before; the only arguments I’ve heard are “proportional fonts magically put extra space after the period that monospace fonts don’t, because your eyes are lying”, and “because my style manual says to only put one”.
To me, it’s continuity of text. Extra spaces make it feel “choppy” and disjointed to me, much in the way I mentioned before if you were to p u t a s p a c e i n b e t w e e n e v e r y l e t t e r. Obviously, not exaggerated like that, but that’s the feeling I get. I like related ideas and thoughts and sentences to be close together. Paragraphs, obviously, should be separated, but not so much so that they create disjoints with each other. Same sort of deal with how letters are kerned. Also, this is why full justified text often drives me slightly nuts–leave it ragged right if it’s going to be pages and pages of text. Most of my books are full justified, and most designers are good about not leaving rivers of whitespace, but I’d prefer it if they were just ragged right.
As I said, I’ve written a book - and there were a couple of places where I actually modified the text to avoid the “river of whitespace” problem. I was actually rereading it today and couldn’t help but notice that in one spot a series of words that appeared on two lines in a row was spaced slightly differently, and it looked kind of bad. Of course leaving a ragged right would have looked worse, so I never seriously considered it when I was laying out the book.
That “p u t a s p a c e i n b e t w e e n e v e r y l e t t e r” business was also slightly amusing to me, because “rivers of whitespace” actually do look like that, except with much larger spaces between the words. (I’d demonstrate, but this stupid website is modifying my text and removing the extra spaces.) And while widely spaced letters are awful, there’s a big difference between what you wrote and actual stretched text: you can tell where the words break. In your version you can’t tell the difference between “in between” and “inbetween” - the extra ‘syntactic sugar’ of more spaces decreases ambiguity and increases readability.
Extra space between sentences does that too - provides additional visual cues as to where sentences break for easier reading. It seems that the people who originally introduced the single-space approach were aware of this, but considered the decreased readability to be an acceptable loss in their ideological pursuit of, well, whatever the hell their ideal was.
It has absolutely bupkus to do with style or convention, or even “readability”. It’s about function. Double spacing doesn’t make it easier to get accurate sentence counts. It makes it possible.
A period with two spaces is the special character to denote the end of a sentence and a period with a single space is the special character to denote an abbreviation.
That sort of “counting sentences” function has not been important historically and is not that important currently. It has everything to do with convention and judgments of aesthetics and readability. I don’t give a flying fuck if a computer can count sentences better with two spaces vs one. How does it look? I think it looks better with one space or a sentence space. Others seem to think it looks better and is more readable with two spaces. That’s all the argument is about. Nobody, except for very very few people with specific needs, care about how a computer reads the spaces. The general argument is simple about what looks and reads better, and people obviously disagree on this.
And it really shouldn’t matter in the least what a computer thinks. I mean, should we standardize fonts into very basic 8-bit patterns or something like that so computer OCR can read them better, humans be damned? Of course not! So it shouldn’t matter to us what makes sentence counting and things of that nature easier to the computer.
I would absolutely agree that the desire to increase ambiguity in order to increase the density of text is a matter of aesthetic taste.
I dispute that it makes the text more readable in any objective sense, but if one’s esthetic reaction to seeing too much blank paper or white pixels in one place is that it literally repels them then I can indeed see it becoming a readability issue. Sort of how like when I see anyone wearing white after labor day I compulsively vomit; clearly white after labor day is thus the stylistically less appealing choice.
Sweet Jeebus, I’ve opened up the hottest debate since, “Tastes Great / Less Filling!”
Admittedly, I had been on the GPO standard for most other weird formatting stuff, and never understood why there were so many different style guides. Why is there an APA, AP, Chicago, etc. style? Couldn’t we have just figured this out once and have been done with it?
Let me guess, some stodgy 1920s Yale academia folks said, “Huffaa-faa-fawwww, we must present our papers in a professional manner. One space in the format. 'Tis perfect.” Then the Harvard academia folks are all like, “Huffaa-faa-fawwwwwwww harumph haa-fawwww, we will prove to the world that the Yale people are inbred, backwater hicks! Our format is perfect–and it shall have two spaces per period! Hahfahfawwww.” Then the Chicago folks are like, “Myaahhhhh seee? Mugsy don’t like that there, myaaahhhh. One space, 'er else I squirt lead, seeeee? Ours is better, myaaahhhhhh.”
But it’s been demonstrated time and time again that decreasing the space between sentences makes text less readable. There may be people for whom single spacing doesn’t make it less readable, but there is no one for whom double spacing makes it less readable.
At the end of the day, using double spaces doesn’t mess things up for anyone. As has been pointed out, when the document is printed the spacing can be compressed to make it appear single spaced even if it isn’t. It doesn’t bother those who don’t care about accurate statistics at all. But single spacing between sentences prevents me from efficiently getting sentence counts and average, longest, or shortest sentence lengths. Why take that ability away from people who care about it just because you don’t?
Since I’m old and learned to type when Nixon was still president I am a firm single-spacer. It’s because I read *The Mac is not a Typewriter *years and years ago. I’m not a mac guy (my brother is and he lent me the book) but since I wasn’t using a typewriter any longer and was pretty much only typing with a computer single-space is the logical choice, as has been explained in nice detail in the above posts. The reason for double spacing is long gone and I’m a reasonable guy.
Except it has not. The jury is out, and I refer you to the Wikipedia cite:
That to me suggests that double spacing may, in fact, slow people down since it states that it is, in fact, slower, but they’re not willing to be married to that conclusion. And, yes, we have another study saying differently, but also that study was based on monospaced fonts where, supposedly, it makes a difference. I’m not convinced it makes that much a difference myself, but it’s hardly the case that it’s been “demonstrated time and time again” that single spacing between sentences makes things less readable. Pretty much all the studies I see remain inconclusive, which is why I say, it really doesn’t matter in the end, but I prefer single spaces because I personally think it looks better and most style guides recommend that approach. If you are typing up something where accurate sentence counting by computer is important, and that sentence counting is triggered by two spaces, then, of course, go with that approach.
But, sure, I don’t really care if you put two spaces when you type something up. It doesn’t hurt nor bother me, especially as when it goes to its final destination, it will usually be adjusted for, anyway.
