I could’ve written this! I had no idea people felt so strongly about it. I think having two spaces after the end of a sentence enhances readability.
ETA: I double-spaced after each sentence above, and now I see that the Dope hamsters compressed each to a single space. *&^%$! hamsters.
The new ADA manual says you have to type one space after a sentence. When I started grad school they harped the crap out of it but I am a double spacer and they never indicated I did anything wrong on the papers I turned in. This was 2007.
Obligatory link:
(I love this link. I refer to it whenever this topic comes up. I actually read it first in The Mac Is Not a Typewriter, by Robin Williams, 1990.)
I also think it enhances readability, but then you run into people who think that it detracts from readability. They complain that it causes rivers of white down the page - these are white spaces that, when placed correctly in a paragraph, and when you focus on a page correctly, can look like streams of white running down a page.
I’d like to point out that this only occurs when people use short sentences, say less than one line long. When people write loquaciously, they don’t occur.
Perhaps it’s more like art than science, if a reasonable percentage of heavy-duty readers believe that double-spacing sentences improves readability. I read a lot, both online and offline. I find double-spaced sentences easier to read. Other people don’t. But I’ll only jokingly say, “It’s all a matter of opinion, and … well … you’re wrong.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act specifies one space for some reason? Or some other ADA?
APA, I would assume.
APA.
:smack:
Before I started at my current company 11 years ago, I never double-spaced or even noticed if someone else did. My first e-mail to my boss was replied with: “Double space after a period!” I had no idea what she was even talking about until I checked some of her e-mails. But it definitely sunk in, and now I always do it. I think it does look better aesthetically. If saving space is important, why have any space at all after any punctuation?They don’t really serve a purpose,do they?Well,do they?
The major influence on typing standards came when the major publishers of the yellow journalism era demanded compatible copy from stringers all across the country, and created house standards. Some of these were at conflict with other existing usage, because some publisher was solving his own special problems. So “widow lines” that got separated at the end of a column became taboo. And to make sure periods didn’t get lost they were required to move inside a final quote mark, whether or not the quote was a complete sentence.
It’s not about saving space. It’s about aesthetics. Those old, hand-typeset books of yesteryear? They don’t have a double space after a period. Seriuosly, go look at any professional typeset book from any era and tell me it’s double-spaced. They have perhaps somewhere between a space and a space and a half, but it’s not two spaces. (And today’s proportional computer fonts are supposed to put the right amount of space after a period.) As far as I know, the double spacing after a period is completely a product of the typewriter era.
I recently completed a stint at my local state legislature. Two spaces was the norm for any bills.
Don’t blame the Dope on this. It’s your browser removing the extra spaces when your post is displayed. The spaces are still there in the source text you typed. I could still see them there when I quoted your post to reply. What happened to your spaces, is the HTML standard removes all but one space between the other characters when they’re displayed on the page in a proportional font. The HTML standard merely emulates automatically what used to be done manually when a typewritten manuscript went to the typesetter.
For this reason, when you’re writing for web publication (and posting to a message board counts in that respect), you might as well continue to double-space after sentences. Readers viewing with a proportional font will automagically have the extra spaces removed from their sight, and in the rare cases when it’s displayed in a non-proportional font, that works out fine too, because you want the old standard with double spaces then.
*** Ponder
Didn’t know that - thanks!
All the people I work with who use the double space after periods are still alive, and they still notice if there’s one incidence of a single space after a period in the middle of a long document – even in proportional fonts – because it sticks out to them visually.
I read tons of proportional text, even in densely-packed 1300-page history books, and at some level I’m always aware of the single space making me feel crowded. I know people say it doesn’t matter, but it does. I am a blindingly fast reader compared to most people, even of text with the single space, despite hating it, so that’s not the issue. I do feel that offsetting sentences with a tiny bit of extra space better preserves the sentence as a unit of thought,
just like I use vertical whitespace for key emphasis.
As far as believing the use of “proportional” fonts means we can eliminate that “wasted” second space, why not goallthewayandsimplyshortenupthespacebetweenwordsevenmore?Itwouldsavealotmorekeystrokesandifyoudon’tthinklosingthesceondspaceimpactsmyunderstanding,whywouldwethinklosingallthespaceswouldimpactanyone’sunderstanding.
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Agree 100%. It very much sticks out for me visually, in printed and screen text.
I read a lot of Dragonlance, and their gnomes talk like that, so I was able to make it out.
A space takes less “space” than your italicizing, by the way. It’s all in the hypertext.
No argument from me, except that aesthetics are subjective and oftentimes the result of familiarity.
One of the things to remember is that in monospaced fonts, the space is as wide as the letters. This is not true in proportional spaced fonts. Double spacing after a period isn’t going to lead to a lot more space.
This is a sentence. This is another sentence after a single space.
This is a sentence. This is another sentence after a double space.
Notice that there’s not that much difference. Spaces tend to be less than a full letter width, so double spacing isn’t putting that much extra space after a sentence. Plus, if you use full line justification, the double space after a period will simply be justified out since the size of spaces are adjusted to keep the right side of the page flush with the margin.
Kerning can also affect it too. You can adjust kerning, so double spaces are less than the width of two separate spaces. And, you can also kern a font to make a space after a period a bit wider. I believe most fonts are now kerned this way, and most computers that use variable width fonts do kerning.
In a monospaced font, the letters line up horizontally on a page. That can make it hard to stare at a page typed in a monospaced font, and the double space after a period made the page easier to read.
There’s no difference at all after your browser sanitized out the extra space. 
Now that’s just exaggeration bordering on the ridiculous. A space in between words clearly indicates where one word ends and the next begins, something that isn’t evident to a reader in your jumbled text all run together. A double space after a period isn’t necessary because a period indicates that a sentence has ended, and a single space is all that is necessary to provide the visual clue that a new word has begun.
Just thought I’d mention that’s how written Thai works. There are no spaces between words, only between sentences.) The words are all jumbled together. There’s no punctuation in Thai, so the space serves as the period.)