I was taught (by my Mom, I think) to double space after ending a period. I wonder where this came from, as it doesn’t seem to be standard. For instance, my iPhone will end a sentence with a period and one space if I double tap the space bar.
So, is this an outdated thing? Do I need to stick to one space now?
I think it has something to do with formatting. When I took typing in HS and college, we were transitioning from typewriters to word processors, and I think my college teacher said something about the double space having to do with page formatting.
Sorry that isn’t much of an answer, and I’d like to know myself. Good question!
As always, Wikipedia has more than you never knew you wanted to know about double spacing at the end of sentences.
ETA: As for whether you should use it, who cares? It’s 2009 and spaces deserve to be free. Word lets you use either. HTML will usually strip the second space, but then again it’s pretty forgiving of whitespace in general so that’s more of a coding issue than a grammatical bias.
I use it because it pisses off the French. Well, that and because I tend to rip apart and reassemble whatever I don’t write and the double spaces tell me where a period marks the end of a sentence. Er, a sentence and what comes after a colon.
However, if I may speak as a reader, I find it helpful. I, like a person 150 years ago, read to myself or others but never entirely silently. Yeah, it’s a bad habit and slows the shit out of my reading, but I see punctuation as a playwright’s notes: you speak here and you pause there. Much like the uses of punctuation in music: the comma (quarter rest), the semicolon (half rest), the colon (three-quarter rest), and period (whole rest).
Very good point, thank you. We read in my Philosophy class, and it is annoying when the reader pauses at the wrong instant: finish the sentence dammit!
Does that mean you consciously notice the difference between a single space and a double space? It’s not the period that does it for you, but that extra millimeter or two of white?
It makes a difference to me. Two spaces is still typical among lawyers, and it’s what I’ve grown used to. I find the Dope slightly harder to read because the space after a period is not really bigger than the space after a comma.
That’s pretty cool. I still always double-space out of habit, but I don’t notice it when others don’t. All that effort… I’m glad somebody’s paying attention 
It’s still proper usage. However, in the day and age of the text message where spaces are at a premium (as are, I guess, extra letters, like in the word 2nite), fewer and fewer people are using them, especially on phones and Blackberries and the like.
All my years of preparing text for publication has drubbed the double space out of me. If I’m editing a letter for someone and the letter is in virtually any font except Courier, I replace the double space after periods with single.
freckafree, I used to read copy before I became a teacher. Our style manual never mentioned spacing after a period. This was the Sixties and typing conventions were still the standard. It was generally a given that two spaces were made after a period.
Has this change come about to save space? Why is Courier the exception? Is this standard practice now throughout publishing? Are you located in the States?
I ask because I am doing some volunteer editing for a charity. Input from others is appreciated.
No, it is not still proper usage. It is only proper to use a double space after a full stop when using a mono-space font, such a Courier.
(This explains why lawyers would use the practice, since legal documents are typed in a mono-space font.)
Yes, the States. OH! (And somewhere in Doperdom, someone is saying IO!)
Courier is a mono-space typeface. Each letter takes up the same amount to space – e.g., the lower case letter L takes up as much space as the letter W. Two spaces after the period were supposedly for ease of reading. It was an obvious visual clue that you’d come to the end of a sentence, when both letters and spaces took up the same amount of, well, space.
If you’re preparing a manuscript to be submitted to a publisher, the publisher will tell you what their style sheet dictates in terms of spacing. As one who was laying out the text on the page, I ruthlessly eliminated double spaces, because that’s the way I was told it was done.
Only on typewriters and other places where monospace fonts are the rule, where the extra whitespace aids readability. In proportionate fonts, it creates rivers of whitespace cascading down the page, and it tends to annoy. But I suppose other rules are adhered to blindly, so why not this one?
Finally, of course, it isn’t usage. It’s typography. Usage refers to how words are used in sentences. Typography refers to how type is set to produce a page of text. But, again, the distinction between usage and grammar is generally lost on those most opinionated on the subject, so why not the distinction between usage and typography?
I was taught to do the double space but then was ridiculed for it in later years. I think it fell out of style. I do only single spaces now.
I agree. Double spacing annoys the living shit out of me, and I grew up being taught double spacing on a typewriter. The “rule” (as mentioned) is to only double space with monospaced fonts, but even there it looks slightly off to me. Maybe a space and a half is what my eyes want to see. When I see extraneous spaces, it just makes my eye “hiccup” when reading the text. It’s an unnecessary visual distraction. Drives me nuts when people employ it.
This is one of those deep philosophical questions, like vanilla v. chocolate, which can’t be resolved on objective grounds. I much prefer two spaces after a period. Others see this as anathema. The right answer, of course, is two spaces.
OMG, did you see the Talk page for that? This is a political issue now! :eek:
I use double spacing. TeX automatically inserts a (nearly) double space after a sentence ends, too, for readability (the whole reason TeX was written was due to a batch of Knuth’s textbooks coming back from the printer with terrible spacing, including single spacing after a full stop).
Why has this even become an issue, though? Is there a technical reason why double spacing should be disfavoured? There’s far more pressing typographical matters than single/double spacing (like conflation of em-dashes, en-dashes, minus signs and hyphens :p).