If the sole purpose of the period was to end sentences, that would be true. But the period does more than a single duty in written English, the second-most common use is marking abbreviations. As noted above, in monospace fonts, the extra space helps readability. Double-spacing after sentences is a good practice to maintain when composing your original source documents. IMHO, it helps having them when proofing your document in your editor/word processor even if you’re starting with a proportional font. It’s easy to automatically strip them out before publishing, but there’s no automatic process that will put them back in for you, again because the period serves more than one function and grammar parsers are far from perfect.
The thing is that with a monospaced font, there are lots of large spaces, even within words. If you have a lowercase L followed by a lowercase I, you’ll have space between them more than half the size of the capital M’s width (which is actually the width of all the letters, when you include the white space added to make it monospaced). With many large gaps in the text, the only way you can make the end of a sentence more obvious is to make the space huge.
With a proportional font (which is most of them), that extra white isn’t inside or between the words, so you don’t have to add any between sentences. Thus, you should only use one space after a period, colon, question mark, or any other punctuation.
Saltire, please don’t “should” all over us.
I don’t tell people how to write their music or how to paint their paintings. While there are definitely proper ways to use the English language, grammar, spelling, and general punctuation rules that exist, the double space after period thing seems largely to be a matter of perspective of the reader.
Some like it, some don’t. Some use two spaces, some don’t. There is no universal hard/fast rule on two spaces. As many people have stated in this thread, there are many industries where people still use or prefer two spaces after a period. People have even given reasons “why,” such as a period serving more than one purpose. You don’t put two spaces after Dr. so-and-so, it’s one space, to indicate that it is not the end of a sentence, but a mark of an abbreviation.
I am a professional writer and have written documentation, manuals, help text, contracts, descriptions for court cases, press releases for bands, and I write a professional music column. Plus I worked as a Documentation Specialist for almost 10 years. Every single place I type, I use two periods after a sentence, and at only one time ever did someone approach me and tell me he thinks I should use one space instead of two after the period. After a discussion during which I pointed out that I’m the Documentation Specialist for the company, and that I wrote our Stylesheet years ago, and the Stylesheet specifies two spaces after a period, the discussion ended.
Write how you want, but the only person that can tell me I “should” use one space after a period is the person who wrote the Stylesheet for the company I’m writing for.
No, this is completely wrong. Double spacing far outdates typewriters (there’s examples of it in manually typeset documents all the way back to the 15th century). Look at this, a first printing of the US Declaration of Independence (not typeset in a monospace font, it’s in Caslon). Quite clearly, it uses an em-space after a full stop (roughly equivalent to a double spacing), yet outdates typewriters by decades, and in fact it was fashionable to use such exaggerrated spacing in the 18th century.
It’s a myth that double spacing has anything to do with typewriters. Plenty of manually typeset books used the practice, and the overwhelming majority of books typeset with TeX or LaTeX (read, virtually every technical textbook) today still use approximately double spacing.
This argument is disingenuous. Of course you’re right that as an employee, you should follow your company’s stylesheet. But you’re avoiding the obvious next point–that as the stylesheet writer, you should have known that the double space rule is for monspaced fonts only.
As a professional writer, I can say that the double space is no longer desired by 90% of publishers. There are still a few hold-outs out there that want everything in Courier font and want the double space after the period.
Hm. There’s no doubt that’s a double space. That contradicts several books I’ve read on the matter, but you’re clearly correct in your example. Published books I have dating to the early 1900s don’t exhibit exaggerating spacing like that and look more like current typesetting conventions (which have something like a space and a half after the period). I had never thought of looking much further back, though. Quite frankly, it surprises me, but I am happy to learn more.
I should add, that in the example given, the space looks significantly more than an em-space to me. The spaces between the words also look exaggerated and awkward. Not that it matters, but an observation…
More examples: 1846 printed in the US, 1941 US printing, 1956 British printing (taken from here, it should be noted).
Fascinating. Time to read some more. It looks awful to my eyes, but aesthetics are subjective and change over time. I just didn’t realize that there were so many (relatively) contemporary examples of this.
I don’t know what that text is from, but it’s definitely not from the Declaration of Independence.
It’s a sample from Jefferson’s first draft.
Admittedly, he wandered from the point a little.
I can’t read anything that has two spaces after each period. Drives me nuts.
Often times a group of us at work will work on a single report. When someone sends me the report, it will invariably have two spaces after each period. I immediately turn them all into single spaces by performing a global replace.
For whatever reason, my boss thinks there must be two spaces after each period. He says it’s a “rule.” So before I send him the report, I convert all the single spaces after periods into double spaces using a global replace.
As I've said in many a previous thread, I prefer the double-space. It doesn't
create the enormous white "holes" that some of the examples cited here seem to
show (some of them look like three or four spaces after the period). I've also
never seen the mysterious white rivers that are cited as reasons why we
shouldn't use two spaces. Perhaps they occur only rarely and I just haven't
picked up the right books. Or perhaps I have picked up the right books, and the
rivers of white just don't bother me that much. [The ones cited in the wiki
article](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Typographic_river.svg) seem to be a result of fully justified text rather than double-spacing
after a period.
It could also be due to the fact that most of what I read now is on a monitor
and the location of all the spaces changes along with changes in the window
size. A little extra white space makes the paragraph more readable. In the
same way that spacing between paragraphs makes the larger story more readable.
The above post retains post-period double-spacing and looks bad with the default monospace font used by the code tag. It looks much better after changing the font to Verdana. Regard:
As I've said in many a previous thread, I prefer the double-space. It doesn't create the
enormous white "holes" that some of the examples cited here seem to show (some of them look
like three or four spaces after the period). I've also never seen the mysterious white rivers
that are cited as reasons why we shouldn't use two spaces. Perhaps they occur only rarely
and I just haven't picked up the right books. Or perhaps I have picked up the right books,
and the rivers of white just don't bother me that much. [The ones cited in the wiki article](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Typographic_river.svg) seem
to be a result of fully justified text rather than double-spacing after a period.
It could also be due to the fact that most of what I read now is on a monitor and the location
of all the spaces changes along with changes in the window size. A little extra white space
makes the paragraph more readable. In the same way that spacing between paragraphs
makes the larger story more readable.
For completeness, here’s Verdana with single spaces after the periods:
As I've said in many a previous thread, I prefer the double-space. It doesn't create the
enormous white "holes" that some of the examples cited here seem to show (some of them look
like three or four spaces after the period). I've also never seen the mysterious white rivers
that are cited as reasons why we shouldn't use two spaces. Perhaps they occur only rarely
and I just haven't picked up the right books. Or perhaps I have picked up the right books,
and the rivers of white just don't bother me that much. [The ones cited in the wiki article](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Typographic_river.svg) seem
to be a result of fully justified text rather than double-spacing after a period.
It could also be due to the fact that most of what I read now is on a monitor and the location
of all the spaces changes along with changes in the window size. A little extra white space
makes the paragraph more readable. In the same way that spacing between paragraphs
makes the larger story more readable.
When I scan the Verdana with double spaces, and then I scan the Verdana without it, I find the double spaced text easier for me. I’m able to locate the starts and ends of sentences easily without having to read every sentence in the paragraph. If I’d previously read the first two sentences, I would find it easier to go back and find the third sentence later to start there, for instance.