# How many spaces between sentences?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [September 22, 2010, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703 "2010-09-22T21:36:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 34

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**Author:** ![Randy\_Seltzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ee7513/32.png) [@Randy\_Seltzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Randy_Seltzer)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2010, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-spaces-between-sentences/554703/34 "2010-09-23T04:03:32Z")

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[One previous thread on the topic](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=513861).

[And another.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=532741) Including my post:

> [@Double space after a period](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/double-space-after-a-period/510801/25):
>
> 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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_%28typography%29), 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]](http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/apa.html%5B/noparse%5D).  
> [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.”)

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