Well, of course. Only Godless commie nazi liberals use a single space after a period. God-fearing, right-thinking, conservative true Americans use two spaces. (Have I been watching too much politics during the health care debate?)
Anyway, when I was working on my Master’s thesis, I used a single space after the period as I’ve always done. My advisor would make edits directly to the manuscript on the computer and would always double-space, as he had written his entire dissertation on a typewriter. Well, he may have had the final copy professionally typed, but he had learned to type on a typewriter. I spent a lot of time removing extraneous spaces to achieve uniform typography. Of course, I also had to use full justification, so I still got odd gaps that were made worse by long chemical names.
To make matters worse, I had a typing teacher in middle school insist that we double-space. So bad information in the age of word processing was still around at least in 1997 and I doubt it’s changed much in the last decade.
How is it “bad information”, though? In the absence of a real technical reason why double spacing should be avoided (which I doubt exists), it’s just a stylistic choice that’s as valid as any other. You can point to hundreds of nicely typeset documents, both manual and automatic, that use double spacing.
In the absence of a technical reason, the only answer to the OP’s question is: “maintain consistency with whatever style manual you are using”.
I am an old fart, set in his ways. I have made many accommodations to the “modern age” but I insist on using double-spaces at the end of a sentence. Call it my small contribution to anarchy.
It isn’t outdated, but often inappropriately used. Back in the days of mono-typeface typewriters two spaces were used to highlight the end of the sentence. In that use, two spaces are appropriate. But two spaces are never used in typesetting. Look at printed books. When you have proper control over the layout through kerning, one space is quite sufficient. Today, with modern operating systems (and most of the typesetting that any program uses is done by the OS) two spaces is not needed nor desired. The thing about spaces is some (all?) programs full-justify a sentence by increasing/decreasing the size of the space in a line. When you have two spaces in a row, the increase is more apparent. It is all about using the tool correctly. In a modern word-processor one can approximate a typeset manuscript. In that case two spaces are inappropriate. In other cases, for instance in email messages, where there is no control over the appearance of the line and two spaces might be appropriate.
I feel pretty strongly about this issue. Relatively. When I became an editor of my academic journal, I wrote a four-page memo to the Editor in Chief, recommending we change from two spaces (“French spacing”) to one space (“standard spacing”). Everyone laughed at me, but we did make the switch.
In a nutshell, the idea of double-spacing is left over from a generation of high school teachers who learned to type on manual typewriters. A manual typewriter, being monospaced, is just about the only place where double-spacing is appropriate. But since these people taught us to type on computers, they required us to use double-spacing in all typing, even with modern proportional fonts. Double-spacing increases the incidence of unsightly rivers, and contrary to the perception of some, it actually decreases readability.[sup]1[/sup] Every major style guide eschews double-spacing, including GPO,[sup]2[/sup] APA,[sup]3[/sup] and Chicago.[sup]4[/sup] Unless you’re using courier new, just don’t do it.
[sup]1[/sup] See Colin Wheildon, Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes - A Study of the Validity (or Otherwise) of Some Elements of Typographic Design (2005).
[sup]2[/sup] ¶ 2.49
[sup]3[/sup] Available at [noparse]http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/apa.html[/noparse].
[sup]4[/sup]§ 6.11 (“Space between sentences in typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks.”)
I do a lot of typing in mono-spaced fonts (writing documentation in code) where I use the second space because that makes it more readable (to me, anyway).
Really, the publishing software should be able to handle this, and let the user type how he wants. Fifteen years ago, Adobe Framemaker had a setting to force single spaces after a period. I use two spaces in these Reply boxes, again because it makes it more readable to me while typing (and because it’s my ingrained habit), but the software cuts it out when I submit.
The greater spacing distinguishes sentence-final periods from other periods. As mentioned above, latex will put additional space after a period, but there’s a way to keep it from doing that in the middle of a sentence.
Maybe using one space increases readability for all the people who like only one space (who are probably in the majority), but us two space lovers, it’s terrible. Especially when I read out loud to my wife, I am always blurring sentences together. I also don’t inflect my voice properly to end the sentence because I can’t see it coming up ahead of time.
The other thing I do not understand is that everyone says mono-spaced fonts are where you use two spaces. This blows my mind. Mono-spaced font’s spaces are even larger, why should I use two then? The “empty” space between sentences in Courier New is like three times as large as it is for New Times Roman, but these are both the “right” way? I know I’ll never win this fight, but it just makes my head spin.
I blame the dirty publishing houses. They just want to put more words on each page. It always comes down to money.
No, it’s done by typesetting (or word processing) software quite independent of the OS. TeX, for example, is typesetting software that runs on more OSes than most computer experts could name. I can’t name a single OS that did or does typesetting.
The closest I can come to making sense of this is if you consider printer drivers (little pieces of software closely tied to the OS that directly control printers) typesetting software. They aren’t: Typesetting involves itself with aesthetics and other complex trade-offs far beyond anything that software is capable of. The same is true of the software that directly controls the screen and other display hardware.
Whether it’s proper or not depends on your stylesheet.
If you write for Associated Press or Chicago Manual of Style, I believe they both currently specify a preference to one space after a period.
However, when a company who publishes anything (be it a magazine, a newsletter, or even help documentation) they should create a stylesheet or style guide, and this determines the specifics of writing things. Use this font, this size, bold these words and not these, capitalize these words in titles and not those, don’t use passive voice, don’t use personal voice, etc.
The company gets to choose whatever they like when they make a stylesheet, so they may specify one or two spaces after the period. That’s why MS Word lets you choose whether or not to correct that for you.
If you’re writing a reply on a message board, you write to your own stylesheet. I notice that most people have very few rules in their personal stylesheets.
Personally, I put two spaces after every period, exclamation marks, and question marks, unless the period ends a paragraph.
Double-spacing is merely a hangover from the days of typewriters - others above have mentioned the issue of mono-spaced fonts on typewriters. Mono-spaced fonts create awkward spaces (think of a letter ‘i’ sitting in the same space as a letter ‘m’), so a double-space after a full-stop aids readability.
However, in conventional typesetting that generally doesn’t use mono-spaced fonts, a double-space actually reduces readability by creating the aforementioned ‘rivers of white’ effect through a paragraph of text. And it’s unnecessary.
As typewriters are now defunct, double-spacing is archaic. Some still use it if they were trained in traditional typing skills, but double-spaces will always be removed by professional publishers.
By the way, I’m British. Double-spacing is not a US phenomenon.
This is one of those issues that is surprisingly contentious. See the thread (that I started!:p) below for thorough discussion of the points and counterpoints.
I completely agree with what Randy Seltzer has to say. Don’t double-space after a period unless you’re using a monospaced font.
Whatever floats your boat, but this sinks mine. To my mind, punctuation has meaning–it’s part of the grammar of written English. The punctuation doesn’t tell me how to read and when to pause, rather, it clarifies for me what the grammatical structure of the sentence I’m reading is.
I’ve read work by students who seem to take the “musical” approach to punctuation you refer to here. It can be bad–very, very bad, to the point of reading like gibberish.
I get it. I stand corrected. I was corrected above. I don’t need you to call my thoughts or opinions of WAGs rubbish… again.
But I still have issues with people making up words because they only get 160 characters in a text message and have to get as much in there as possible. The word isn’t 2nite… it’s tonight. And if you’re going to spell it l8r, I will not be seeing you later.
