How many spaces after a period

How many spaces do you leave after a colon in a manuscript? One space after a colon. There is a traditional American typing practice, favored by some, of leaving two spaces after colons and periods. This practice is discouraged by the University of Chicago Press, especially for formally published works and the manuscripts from which they are published.

Please help. I have confusion regarding the correct spacing after periods and other closing punctuation. My company uses the font Arial and consistently uses a flush-left margin. We are an engineering company. My job consists in preparing documents and letters for customers.

Everything I read in manuals and from technical writers directs me to use one space after periods. I find that it works very well, except occasionally, when an extra space helps readability. Knowledgeable engineers have embraced the one space use as being consistent with the font design and automation of reports.

Others are unpleased with the one space, they think they have difficulty reading. I, too, had an adjustment period which I forced myself to endure until it became automatic to read easily.

We are preparing technical information. What do you think? Thanks for your wonderful support and especially the quick answers.

I greatly appreciate your service. Published work these days rarely features two spaces after a period. In the era when type was set by hand, it was common to use extra space sometimes quite a bit of it after periods, a practice that continued into the first half of the twentieth century.

And many people were taught to use that extra space in typing class. But introducing two spaces after a sentence-ending period—and only after those periods—causes problems. Absolute consistency is easy to monitor when double spaces are never allowed, but less easy when some spaces after periods are double and others single such as those at the ends of abbreviations and initialisms in running text.

Yes, caller id lets us know a little bit about who is calling but not always. The id is usually the name who the person who pays for the phone service. Typewriters were what changed the rules. And it is not necessary to type two spaces to get a period on a smart phone.

The rule of typesetting that predates typewriters by years says that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words. They did not. Typing two spaces after a period is simply the exercise of the existing rules when using a typewriter. More modern technology actually makes things even worse because computers have a really hard time figuring out whether to display all the spaces present in a chunk of text, and an equally hard time automatically determining appropriate spacing based on context.

So this begs the question where you got your information from. Are you drawing your own conclusions based on your experience or have you actually done research into what is the preferred method, both aesthetically and psychologically? For centuries predominantly one space was used after periods.

Also, I can tell you that when I see a double space, my focus heightens unnecessarily. This means I experience subtle interruptions after every period, which is actually an extra strain and diminishes reading. The authority would be real-world typesetting guides, especially those that pre-date the typewriter. Despite your claims to the contrary, the standard was to have a larger space between sentences than between words.

This is inaccurate for several reasons. There were multiple kinds of spaces, each with a different width. Spacing was almost always tweaked to justify the text. And finally, the rule you are implying, that sentences had no more distance between them than between words, is false.

For centuries, the rule was to put a greater distance between sentences than between words, from 1. The main point on the long-winded Heraclitean site boils down to we should go back some 75 or years ago to extra space following punc and that it was publishers who pushed for whittling the space in a move to save resources.

As if that were a bad thing. In the quest for sustainability alone, we should eliminate double word spaces. Well, you are hearing a bout it now, from yet another source. I am a Librarian, have been since the early seventies. The double space, the slightly larger white space does, indeed, clearly clue the reader to the end of the sentence, and it makes reading faster and more comprehensive.

I am more likely to be hiring a lot of you, and I want clear, easily understood writing skills. So, bite me. I totally agree with you. Besides the fact that my fingers and thumb automatically hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence, my eyes welcome the extra space that signals my feeble brain that the end of a sentence is at hand. Thanks for your comment. How about the misuse and interchanging of then and than? I see it more and more. It is exasperating. Also, since when did we start pronouncing the T in the word often?

I hear newscasters and advertisers doing it, thinking, I suppose, that it make them sound educated! Lets just say that 40 is a ways back and leave it at that. Perhaps my typing teacher, was not as given to OCD as yours. They had learned it that way in typing and they had no plans to change. Fortunately all three of them have long since retired. Now where did I put my sliderule? Thanks for the laugh, redmac! Thank you for pointing out how old I am.

You just me brought back with scary visions from my typing classes in middle school. I will say though, these courses were invaluable to me know I can type on the computer pretty much without every needing to look down.

Thank you for pointing out the one vs. Now that I know the update I will implement immediately. Regarding using you as a source for educational purposes, I definitely see how your site can work.

Stay in touch! This one cracked me up. I am also SO grateful I learned to type. Pretty much every day. Actually, the typewriter had nothing to do with it. Both are correct. Use whatever is your preference and depending on font what you think looks better.

The reason we use two spaces is readability. Even though computers use proportionally spaced typefaces, using two spaces makes your text easier to read. Your mission when you publish a document is to make it as readable as possible. I feel like this is strictly a matter or preference. Style manuals are guidelines, not The Law. Those of us who learned two spaces can continue to use them. I just found this article and read the follow-up article as well. I am not here to argue typography.

I will leave that to those who are expert in that field. To me, it is a non-issue, unlike the Oxford comma, for which I will argue in favor of using all day long.

What I find even more disconcerting is the amount of intellectual snobbery present in the comments. Why is it that so many of those people commenting are so confident that only their opinions are correct? Yes, standards change, hence the constant debate over the Oxford comma, but most changes such as these take place fairly naturally over time. The use of two spaces after end punctuation is still appropriate, like the Oxford comma, in some circumstances and not necessarily in others.

The argument that a capital letter signifies the beginning of a new sentence has merit, but for we geriatrics who cannot always see well enough to differentiate between a comma and a period, a capital letter may not be a sufficient signal that a new sentence has begun. Actually Jenniefer I think the point is being completely missed on why you should think ha!

First, I believe that typeface and font design is completely subjective, and up to the designer and user of it. So how can any one suggest a modification of spacing on a line of copy is just plain wrong? In reality though the reason why in most cases you should refrain from two spaces is when the line breaks and could cause a new line to start with a space. That of course looks odd. Like a false start of a new paragraph.

And if some one else is going to flow your copy on to a page using A page layout tool, then you would be causing extra work for them as they will have to remove the spaces, so they can has the control they need to design the page. Working on that. So, in school, when they type for assignments and someone points out, double-space after a period. They had no idea. This is just a symptom of a larger problem — a generation doomed due to its narcissism and absolutely unshakeable faith that facility with technology is the same thing as a facility with language and critical thinking.

We all have a vital part to play in the scheme of life. Bad combination. The result — bullshit like this about double spacing.

I read something similar recently about no one uses Times New Roman font anymore. All of this is distraction and the triumph of surface over substance. In other words, what? If two rather than one,space after a period causes anguish in some folks … I shall gleefully continue using two spaces.

When you press them on it, they tend to cite their aesthetic sensibilities. Well, I like two spaces. Now, try again to give me a valid reason to stop using two spaces.

A valid reason! My work still uses 2 spaces and it drives me crazy! I learned typing on a manual typewriter in the 80s but with the advent of computers almost all businesses and my university profs switched to 1 space. Sorry it upsets you so. There is value in retaining older ways, such as teaching cursive writing so students can read documents before the use of typewriters.

Good luck with your issues. Honestly, I cannot believe the utter collossal waste of time spent discussing the one space or two space after a period theory of typing. I learned the two space way and have no problem continuing or discontinuing using two spaces. Life is good if this issue takes up so much of our space and time. Who says I have to follow new age rules?

No one follows old age rules. I am 75 years old and I think I have made enough accommodations in my life. I have met my quota. So there……. As an English major, I disagree. The standardization of 2 spaces after a period was meant to separate the ideas of two sentences. This is because a period can be used within one. The a single space was used allowing the continuation of the single idea. The double space is used as a delineation between the sentence vs.

See what I did there? I believe the forgotten delineation is from the lack of educational awareness, in the last few generations, making it a pseudo standard; as no one truly has to write in grade school anymore.

This has made the grammar output of the younger generations pitiful in comparison to the older. Ask your younger generation what a semi-colon is for. It makes me shudder to think their answer.

Just saw your comment and reply about others having stated the same below. In , when I learned to type on one of the ancient typewriters, it was drummed into our heads that you put TWO spaces at the end of a sentence between the period and the start of the new sentence.

Deal with it. Consider me surprised!! My one question is. I learned as a 9th grader in school…. I teach keyboarding in high school. We still use two spaces. The brain can much more easily visualize the difference between an abbreviation and the end of the sentence.

Know this is greatly debated in journalism due to space requirements. But on a regular paper or email, use two!!! Seems like an uphill battle. I think this discussion is more than aesthetics. It is about style, readability, acceptable standards, and, yes, technology. As a writer, reader, print publisher and web publisher, there are many, many considerations that go into what is seen on the screen and the page.

I usually opt for whatever helps people to understand each other. To use what actually aids in comprehension. If she tends to get defensive about these things, then let it go. No harm, no foul. But if she can take a little constructive criticism, you might mention it. That is apparently a relatively common thing for both native French speakers and people who learned English in India.

I just walked over to the study to ask my wife, who was born and raised in France, about them using a space before the punctuation. She told me that it is an aesthetic value of clarity and has nothing to do with grammar. Evidently nothing looks worse than a word ending with a w or m followed by an exclamation mark.

But it comes down to two main points- one historical, and the other aesthetic. His historical point is wrong. As for the aesthetic argument, I also disagree. It has been written elsewhere see, e. I believe that for non-justified alignment left aligned , double spaces look better.

Every sentence stands out as separate. It also helps clarify through a defined rule- without having to use or understand the context- when a period ends a sentence, and when it just appears as part of a word. I do agree that double spacing can be bad looking if a paragraph uses justified alignment.

This is because each space can ordinarily be expanded by justifying, and so doubling spaces can lead to huge islands. It also increase the odds that a word will be pushed off to the next line, which will have the effect of increasing the size of all spaces, including the double spaces. This effect is most harmful when the width of a line of text is small, like in multi-column newspaper-style text.

Most magazines and books are now justified-aligned, so double spacing is probably not appropriate for them. A final note- the one thing that is absolutely, always wrong, is being inconsistent with spacing. Double space or single space, but at least choose one. I will think this over and might possibly have something smarter to say than dayum in the morning. Have a good night! Although your sources are quite correct, I still passionately disagree with you.

What you will see however are wide gaps in between words in order to justify text. Remember that with letterpress printing you have a lot less control over the spacing of your text—both word spacing as well as letter spacing.

You will see typography is a lot less restricted, particularly in the early type printing days where the Venetian typefaces were briefly used. These typefaces followed the conventions of chirographic texts. Within 50 years the Garalde style is introduced and at this point typefaces because less calligraphic and more mechanical. We enter the Renaissance, which is a period of rational thinking and so you will see a lot of standardization in this period.

For example, whereas the proportions of the letters in the Venetian models followed the scripts that were used before letter printing and thus featured a lot of variety in width look at the wide H for example and a low x-height, in the Garalde models you see particularly the uppercase letters become much more consistent in width. Eventually we get to the Transitional style, which is even more mechanical, features more details and has a higher contrast because technological advances allow this to happen.

In typefaces like Romain du Roi you can see there is a tendency to design typefaces according to geometric rules. I have to confess here that the double space can often be seen in this period, in France at least. The French still have a few specific typographic practices which deviate from the general standardization though, so it might not be fair to base our typographic practices on what the French do. However, during this time the French created a campaign to enforce their ideals around typography and this was in fact the very reason Romain du Roi was designed, so France could join the fun the Italians, Dutch and English were already having.

During the Baroque there was quite a lot of typographic experimentation. Typefaces like Baskerville were initially criticized for their severe contrast which diminished the reading experience.

People got used to it though, and this Transitional style with vertical weight distribution and high contrast is still prevalent today. In fact, most modern book typefaces tend to mix aspects of the Garalde and Transitional styles. After the Transitional style the experimentation continued and the contrast was raised even further. Thus the Didone style was created. Often an optical variant with less contrast was used, or a typeface like Baskerville, which works very well with Didone typefaces.

Still, I would prefer not to read a whole book set in Baskerville. Eventually we enter into a period of industrialization and this is where you will see a regress in typography. As I mentioned technological advances allowed for more typographic experimentation and expression. With the industrialization marketing became prominent and so there was a need for simpler but stronger typographic expression. Thus the grotesque sans serif was created.

They went against aesthetic ideals. This is also when the Egyptienne came to be, which we now tend to refer to as slab serif. With the Egyptienne came the Clarendon style, and this is where you see a regress in book typography. Everything had to be printed fast and in big quantities. Here you see a lot of spacing issues and horrible justification choices. It is said that justified text diminishes the reading experience and this is invariably true to at least a minimal extent.

Everything you do which adds more variety to the spacing will diminish typography. W ould yo us ay th is tex t is com forta ble to read? There is no good argument to use it and there are great arguments against it.

Arguments on functionality, mostly. Some mention the double space is necessary to divide sentences, but this is absolutely ludicrous. This is the very reason the use of uppercase letters at the beginning of a sentence became standardized. How many different principles do you want to add to distinguish between sentences? At one point is it enough? It took centuries to define what works best. Without a doubt you will find the use of double spaces frequently throughout history, but there is a reason it never became standardized.

It goes against the principles of proper typography. The point is not that the single space has been standardized for centuries, but that there is a need for standardization. They adopted the practice of proportional fonts into monospace fonts, rather than the other way around. NOT a double space. Have you ever heard of the en-dash and em-dash? Whereas we incorrectly use hyphens for just about everything, the hyphen is only meant to hyphenate words or to combine words.

The only exception I can think of is to divide the numbers in a date notation. To signify a range in numbers or a correlation between two locations an en-dash should be used and to signify a sentence within a sentence, one would have to use the em-dash. Em-dashes often tend to be too obtrusive. Some typefaces feature shorter or thinner em-dashes. If your typeface features a rather obtrusive em-dash, it may be best to use an en-dash instead and use half spaces around it.

Does that make a single space the preferred practice? Do you find that to be logical? Recent or not, it has become standardized. The discussion might stop there, especially after giving all the reasons for why it has been standardized. Earlier printers had advice to deal with the situations where the holes became too numerous or looked bad. Perhaps so. Historically there have been a lot of typographic disasters which nevertheless were common practice.

Sometimes a new technology comes along which imposes certain restrictions on us and so there is a temporary fallback, but as technology improves the typographic sophistication returns. I talk with typographers and type designers regularly and I think there are very few who would argue for double spaces, especially considering historically one and a half space was preferred and not a double space.

These are not the kind of people who blindly follow standards; these are the people who help set the standards. We typographers are the ones making the rules on typography. Let me close by repeating one sentiment. Not only was the double space never standardized or used predominantly in any historical period, but in fact historically the preferred space was around the width of the letter M. A double space is two Ns, which is simply too big.

Do you really need more than that? And regardless of historical use, the fact is that most of us consider the handling of double spaces to be aesthetically displeasing and unprofessional. In other words, we have more or less standardized the single space, so stop being a rebel for the sake of it. You can convince me to leave out the space after a period, mainly because the computer makes it look okay.

See I do it too. And if you are using a French word-processor program, it will automatically put the spaces before a colon, a semi-colon, an exclamation point, a question mark, and a quote mark. Anyhow the computer works it out.

That is so interesting, Paula. I never knew that. Anyone else out there grow up under that same rule? There are two separate debates: the one about whether people should be continuing to press the space bar once or twice in the age of digital fonts, and whether we actually want to use much longer spaces after the ends of sentences than we do between words. In the former, pretty much the entire publishing industry is agreed that only one space is the way to go. In the latter, I kind of have a fondness for this kind of thing:.

I hate to admit it and I will deny it if anyone says I admitted it! However, I find it hard to find the end of a sentence in typed material nowadays. Often when I read Time magazine for example, I zing past the end of the sentence, forcing me to reread in order to figure out what is going on. I blame it on my aging eyes. Bring back the two spaces! For me, this is an accessibility issue. Another interesting point. Also, I feel you on the aging eyes thing: I have 4 separate pairs of reading glasses!

I was probably out of college a decade before that happened. You may find that many people still do it because they were taught it during typing class. After that, we were on our own. Well, this is interesting, because ideally I think we should use 1,5 space after a period.

I have to wonder if, as technology advances, we will reintroduce the 1,5 space. Oh, dear. Try as you might, you will NOT convince me to stop using double spaces between sentences. Sort of. I mean, really. I love them. Some people thought it was pretty funny. You may not. You ARE welcome! I love ellipses and emphasizing with CAPS! And I just read that post and I most definitely approve of the word punctuationally.

So the irritation is just aesthetic. At all. I can have fun with formatting. That first one was shouted and the second one was whispered…. Language is such an important tool and we should use it with joy. And I worship them. Nice talking to you — both of your sites look fantastic. I will be visiting. I hope you come back here, too! The irritation for me is that there is an increased sense of awareness at the end of a sentence when a double space has been utilized.

Good typography is invisible. I feel the discussion could actually end there. It simply diminishes the reading experience even if extra spaces would divide things more clearly. Typography is about the flow of things, not about division. I absolutely love the use of em-dashes and semicolons, but the em-dash is actually a very obtrusive element. Thank you, Jennifer.

Readers are too impatient, We have to grab them and keep them. Still, I do have to fight to stay loose. I want it to be right! Whatever the final ruling on spacing is, no one should be pressing the spacebar twice after a sentence. Either way, take the manual work out of it and let the computers do it for us. Many of us use abbreviations in our writing.

My iphone does that and its super annoying. Burn the extra calories pressing the space bar twice. It CAN be done, but then the type designers need to address this and technology needs to advance a bit further. With OpenType functionality you can add a lot of advanced features in your typeface which the end user can utilize. OT functionality is also slowly being implemented into websites, but it will take a while before it becomes standardized in our browsers or on our computers. I can and I do.

I absolutely enjoy hitting the space bar twice. I write for a living and few things make me angrier than one space after a sentence. Using one space after the period makes all of the sentence bleed together. For a quick reader, two spaces helps distinguish between a comma signifying a pause vs.

It is similar to the way that street signs are designed differently so that you know the meaning without ever reading them. STOP signs are a red hexagon. Yield signs are yellow triangles. To distinguish between sentences we use capital letters which were initially not used in combination with lowercase but it became practice to distinguish between sentences more , a period AND a space.

And still you need more to distinguish? If I apply this to your traffic sign analogy, I suppose we would be building colorful fences around traffic signs to emphasize that a traffic sign is there. This is a moment of increased awareness of the typography while good typography should be invisible.

Look at my previous posts on this page for elaborate explanations. Which is exactly why we need more space after a sentence than between words: there SHOULD be a slight pause between sentences! When reading aloud, I find I will miss the slight pause that should be there, continuing to the next sentence too quickly.

When reading quickly, the same thing happens, and I find I have to go back and re-read at least part of the sentence to understand what it says before going on. It slows me down greatly and makes it much more difficult to comprehend the text well. Ironically enough, I find it most problematic online when reading html which strips out double spaces , only partially because I am often scanning quickly online.

That looks okay too. But most of my students pay little to no attention to how many spaces they sue between sentences. I routinely get essays from about half my students that have a variable number of spaces between sentences, sometimes as many as four, but often three. That attitude comes from not really having any investment in their writing beyond what grade it earns, and they know through experience that most English teachers are too busy to spend much, if any, time fussing with them over typography, nor to hold them accountable for it in the form of a grade.

So they learn not to care about it. The basic purpose of all spelling, punctuation and typographic rules is to promote clarity of communication by avoiding confusion and ambiguity. So, why the overbearing, scolding tone? Hi John. I would argue, though, that certain conventions serve a greater purpose than simple clarity. After years of teaching English and professional work as a copy editor, I can tell you most errors I marked caused zero confusion in terms of meaning.

But when someone takes the time to get these things right, they convey more than clarity; they convey professionalism. They tell me they are a person who bothers with those kinds of details. There is a kind of kinship between people who care about the details in any given field.

And sometimes people who share that particular kinship want to make a little noise. No harm intended, though. The world has way bigger problems than this. Jennifer…I think the main thing is just to be consistent with whichever choice you make.

By your reasoning I may as well add three spaces because it promotes clarity of communication while keeping the meaning the same. If justified text is typographically less good due to a greater variety in spacing, then at least on a very subtle level adding two spaces after periods will have a similar effect. The use of a semicolon, an ellipsis or an em-dash can completely change the tone of the text and actually change meaning, and so can spaces, At the very least it creates a pause, which in itself has meaning.

Spacing absolutely can create confusion and ambiguity, and it can also solve it. A period might be the end of a sentence, but it might also follow initials, abbreviations, numbers, and other uses. A period followed by two spaces solves a real problem with ambiguity. This is especially useful in the modern age i. Also let me say that all this talk about typographers is nonsense.

Typographers as a group have no particular opinion on the issue. That kept me laughing all the way down!

As a definitely over 40, I also did typing at school, though never learnt to do the double spacing. What I was eternally grateful for though, was the decline of shorthand classes at that exact time! Was not at all passionate about such a class, so I was relieved when it was outed. I do double spaces to improve readability. The Skidmore study was small and less than definitive—essentially dipping a toe into a long-unquestioned practice. Most importantly, the effects appeared early in processing, and spacing did not affect overall comprehension.

The fact that our eyes may move a little faster is less important than whether the concepts make it into our brains. Angela Chen at The Verge also gave a pointed critique of the methodology:. The two-space convention is left over from the days of typewriters. Typewriters allot the same amount of space for every character, so a narrow character like i gets as much as a wider character like w. This is called a mono-spaced font. With a typewriter, it makes sense to add an extra space to make it clear that the sentence has ended.

Also, it looks better. Even in the studies where researchers have removed interword spaces altogether, reading comprehension is still very high. For example, Thai and Chinese are typically written without spaces between words, even though studies have found that when space is added between words, reading speed increases. The standard comes down to aesthetics, tradition, conservation of paper and space—basically, the fact that reading is an act of much more than information delivery.

This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone.