Question: Some assert that the double-space is unneeded because type-setting software will substitute a special wider space after a period. Is this software smart enough to know that ‘Mr,’ ‘Dr,’ ‘Mrs,’ etc. never end sentences so their periods should be followed by a narrower space?
Just to back this up, here’s Language Log’s take (via some other people) on all the things that are wrong with this most recent study (and there are a lot): Language Log » An inconclusive psycholinguistic take on post-period spacing.
Someone mentioned earlier that the two-space convention made it possible to count sentences. I have to admit, I am trying really hard to think of a situation in which I would have any need or desire to know how many sentences there are in a particular document. I’ve been doing freelance writing for close to 30 years now and have written books, articles, textbooks, teacher guides, and a lot of other things, and here’s what they tell me to count:
–words, most often (always for books and articles, and sometimes for educational publishing too)
–lines, often (when using a template for a textbook or something similar)
–characters, once in a while (for small text snippets in textbooks, usually)
–paragraphs, though hardly ever (though I can’t specifically remember why)
And in my work as an adjunct professor I most often ask students to “measure” by the page or the paragraph.
The only time I can think of is when I was hired to write picture captions for a particular book, and the style sheet said the captions had to be exactly two sentences long. But I could figure that out by looking:D
So fight my ignorance. Why and when necessary? (And what do you do with sentences that end with question marks or exclamation points, which IIRC get one space afterwards, like commas? Or sentences that end with dashes? Or when you start quoting William Carols Williams?)
I’m quoting you for convenience, but I’m addressing this to every other supporter of double-spaces.
If the final product is going to have one space - and all final products these days with the tiniest percentage of exceptions use the one space rule - why would you insist on double spaces? Why? Nothing you’ll ever see or use or give to someone else will ever have two spaces after periods.
I can sort of understand people being taught to do this in this old days on typewriters and just letting the habit ride. But to insist upon it is, IMO, madness. I cannot understand it. I mean, I literally cannot think of one reason to justify this practice. It can’t possibly be to give manuscripts to editors. Again, except for a couple of arcane places, no editor in the world will want this and many go out of their way to decry manuscripts done with two spaces. In an increasingly electronic world, with virtually everything arriving through browsers, it is impossible without great effort even to force two spaces upon a reader. So why start there?
What is going on?
I’m with you, Tripler. Double-spaces, semicolons, two spaces after a colon always, and you will have to take my Oxford comma from my cold, dead hands.
Here’s a reasonable run-down I found, which includes examples of where not double, but triple spaces between sentences was the standard of the day.
And the conclusion is very practical, and echoing Exapno Mapcase’s sentiment above:
The double spacers are resistant to change, not unlike the Amish.
I don’t even know if the text entry field dictates the finished work. Let’s try it.
Test. One space.
Test. Two spaces.
Test. Three spaces.
Test. Four spaces.
Test. Five spaces,
Edit. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter how many spaces you use.
“Insist” makes it sound as though they’re demanding it of others. I assume most double spacers do so out of habit and it take no more significant time to quickly double tap the space bar than to hit it once. If anything, it’s slower to mentally check yourself and be sure you only do it once. And maybe you’ll eventually break the habit or change it but… why? Especially if, as you say, the final product will be the same anyway.
Thanks for reading the thread before posting.
Didn’t you read begbert2’s post? He *fired *someone for taking the two spaces out. How is that not insisting?
I learned to type in a high school typing class back in the early 1970s, so of course I was originally a double-spacer. I also used the lowercase L as the numeral 1, because a lot of typewriters didn’t have the 1 key (and if you wanted an exclamation point, you had to type a period, backspace, and type an apostrophe).
At some point, I stopped double-spacing. I’d be hard pressed to tell you when it happened, because I didn’t make a conscious effort to retrain myself. One day I realized I wasn’t a double-spacer anymore, and that was that.
(A) I’m not going to answer for every person on the planet. Firing people for the number of spaces after a period is something I expect comes up extremely rarely unless it’s a a simple refusal to follow workplace policy.
(B) There’s a big difference between being unhappy with someone’s treatment of your writing and making changes versus demanding that no one else do it that way.
Whatever. I’m still waiting for an answer for why people who do it for other than old habit do it (which I already acknowledged), and where they expect to see the output.
Already given above.
From my reading of the LL piece its basic conclusions seem to be that (a) the single-space practice can be used as a form of virtue signaling by annoying pedants, (b) there doesn’t seem to be any credible study definitively showing a difference in readability between single and double spacing, especially with proportional fonts, (c) we can all agree that single spaces are standard practice in publishing, and (d) there are far more important things to argue about with respect to people’s various writing proclivities. I agree with all of those (he said, emphatically hammering in two spaces, even knowing full well that HTML will reduce them to one).
Not “necessary”. Habit. And where I do much of my writing – MS Word – the two spaces are rendered faithfully, and I like it. I find it particularly helpful not so much with monospaced fonts, but with sans-serif fonts (which I don’t use often, but hey, consistency and all that).
Not in my writing! Question marks and exclamation marks get two spaces when they end a sentence, just like after a period.
If anything, this supports a rationale for the two-space rule. Em dashes are frequently used within a sentence, and I’d venture to guess they’re used that way far more often than to end a sentence. They may or may not be bracketed by a space on either side, though typographical practice is no space. Either way, two spaces after a sentence-ending em dash helps to more clearly set off this unusual punctuation from the next sentence. Now if a sentence ends in an ellipsis, my habit (and it may be an eccentricity) is to place a space between the end of the sentence and the ellipsis. To me this is consistent with the common practice of a space before and after ellipses when they occur in the middle of sentences (though some style manuals say no spaces). And here’s the rub: after a sentence-ending ellipsis, I insert my usual two spaces before the next sentence, thus helping to distinguish sentence-ending from sentence-splicing ellipses, and doing it in a manner consistent with the two-space practice.
Has never happened, but I imagine I’ll figure something out if it ever does.
But I’ll happily concede the two-space practice to be an eccentric habit. I’m at peace with the one-space world. Just don’t get me started on “could care less”, a perverse solecism that literally makes me despair for our language. (By “literally” of course I mean “figuratively”. Or maybe not. Maybe I literally mean “literally”. I’m sure the careful reader will be able to figure it out.) 
I learned, and still use, double spaces after terminal punctuation in high school.
In 1996.
Hey, I am a professional editor, by which I mean, I do this for a living. All the print publishers want one space.
It is quite possible to get an accurate count with single spaces. Single versus double doesn’t usually change the page count by even one page and it’s the word count we go by anyway.
I am also a published author. Among the guideines for my final draft to be turned in to the publisher were, no multiple spaces and no tabs. The publisher was Random House if that’s important.
You talked about sentence count, which - as everybody has pointed out - nobody in the entire world has ever cared about. Or even heard of. Certainly nobody else here has mentioned that as a reason.
Hey, I appreciate your long and careful and thought out response! Only thing is, I was actually not referring to the practice of putting two spaces after a period; the stuff you quoted was asking when anybody might need to count sentences. That’s what the “necessary” referred to, and the other questions (involving other end punctuation marks and quoting poets who don’t use them at all) were all relating to that.
I fear I haven’t read the whole thread, but I’ll comment. I was taught to type on manual typewriters. The classroom had two Selectrics, but only the elite (heh) typists were allowed to use them. We were taught to use two spaces.
Desktop publishing was the first thing I did a lot of using a computer. So I quickly stopped using two spaces. When I get text from others, the first thing I do is change all multiple spaces to singles (or sometimes tabs, if they use spaces when they should have tabbed). I prefer to use the spacing built into the font, unless something looks really weird and needs manual adjustment.
The recently-done study did nothing to settle this question. They used a monospaced typewriter font. People’s heads had to be clamped in place, which did not simulate how people read very well. And the slight improvement in reading average reading speed masked what was really going on.
They had each subject type a passage before the test, and noted who typed with single and who typed with double spaces. It turned out that only the double-spacers read text with double spaces faster. The single spacers read with the same speed regardless of the spacing.
So it isn’t that double-spacing makes text more readable. It is that typists who double-space can’t read as well.
My bad for not having read carefully enough to realize that the thread at that point had run off the rails into the sentence-counting digression. So please consider my humble submission an inadvertent and clumsy attempt to bring the discussion back on topic, the points I made being still relevant in their own right, and I stand by them!