Double spacing after a full stop?

My wife says this is standard practice and the correct way to do things, yet I’ve failed to find any evidence of this in any correspondence from any company currently in my home.

A little research on the internet reveals that she’s right, but it’s now seen as old fashioned and that it’s rarely seen any more with modern fonts and word processors. Double spacing can also be seen as ‘gappy’ and distracting from the message you’re trying to convey. Your thoughts?

I do it.

I’m a double space person

Modern fonts are supposed to remove the need apparently. I don’t like how it looks personally so I don’t do it but no clue what’s right or wrong.

That’s how I was taught at school. I think it looks better. See.

Edit: What do you know, the forum removes the double space!

Along with the full stop and capital letter, the double space shows a distinction between a new word and a new sentence.

I hate it, it looks silly with modern fonts.

I was never taught it at school. Only in professional documentation. I normally use it now.

Made sense with a typewriter. Doesn’t make sense anymore.

PS Your wife is right (by definition).

fyi, if using indesign, it’s easy enough to create a script to get rid of them.

Double tap!

I’ve used it since my post-grad dissertation thesis thingy.

Any modern fashions are irrelevant. There is only one correct way. And just why does this look wrong?

Go for it! So long as you want to look like you learned to type in the 1960s. It’s one of those religious things, but in this case it’s wrong. Very wrong 🙂

It’s a hangover from the typewriter age. Typewriters by design used monospaced fonts. No longer necessary in the digital age, and now considered bad practise.

As others have said, no longer considered correct. However, I can’t get out of the habit and still automatically double tap the space bar after a full stop when typing even though I know I shouldn’t.

My mum says it’s a double space and she is always right. A sentence reads much better with a double space. Also it is quite nice getting to press the space bar twice, even though it will of course contribute to keyboard wear and tear.

Old style typewriting = Yes, double spacing after a full stop. A must.

Microsoft Word = Full justification for the paragraph. Yes and no depending on the length of the sentence. (programme adjusts accordingly).
Microsoft Word = Left justification for the paragraph. Yes.
Microsoft Word = Right justification for the paragraph. Yes.

, and now considered bad practise.

Unlike poor grammar 😉

Bad practice my arse. It helps with the overall paragraph structure and makes documentation easier to read. I demand it of all the documents that I check. and I have been known to make people redo the document they have written so that is correct. I also demand the correct use of the degree symbol and a non breaking space between numbers and their units.

and I have been known to make people redo the document they have written so that is correct.

I’ve worked with people who have done exactly that, and they were, without exception, absolute worthless strokers.

PS, gonefishin, you need to proofread your post, you don’t meet your own high standards 🙂

Double. Spacing. Is. So. Outdated. Modern. Devices. Have. An. Alternative. Use. For. Double. Space.

It’s standard in defence writing too

Double spacer but don’t care what other people do.

That makes me be both traditional and liberal, so I proclaim myself winner of the thread.

I’m not at work today ;). Besides it’s not enough that work be correct, it has to look correct and I’ve always found that people who don’t appreciate that fact are, to use your vernacular, strokers.

I win.

You guys are losers for not taking into consideration the software on the pooter. You need to provide more details for when to use or not to use it.

Drac fails big time so you need to redo the entire document again.

😆

Made sense with fixed monospace fonts (like on a typewriter) where a . is as wide as a W
Makes no sense at all on a modern proportional fonts where each character has a different width.

Fixed/typewriter:
..........
WWWWWWWWWW

Proportional/modern:
……….
WWWWWWWWWW

See?

I’ve worked in design and print for pretty much all of my life, since my very early twenties, and I’ve never been told about double spacing. A single tap on the space-bar when typing this gives a perfectly good space after a full-point. Doing a double space, like I’ve just done at the beginning of this sentence, look too much, quite frankly.
I’ll try to remember this when I go back to work on Tuesday, and ask someone I’ve worked with for all that time, as he is pretty sharp on typography and getting it right.

Bad practice my arse. It helps with the overall paragraph structure and makes documentation easier to read. I demand it of all the documents that I check. and I have been known to make people redo the document they have written so that is correct.

Glad I don’t work with you. Ridiculous behaviour!

GrahamS – Member

See?

No see! 😈

Try typing few sentences with Full justification or Right justification to see how the paragraphs look like.

It all depends on whether the software will deal with the space adjustment. 🙄

I double space but I also put a space between a word and a question or exclamation mark which is “wrong”, I’m told.

Drac fails big time so you need to redo the entire document again.

What document?

scaredypants – Member

I double space but I also put a space between a word and a question or exclamation mark which is “wrong”, I’m told.

No spacing between exclamation mark, question mark etc.

Drac – Moderator

Drac fails big time so you need to redo the entire document again.

What document?

Whatever documents you are working on … 😆

CountZero – Member
I’ve worked in design and print for pretty much all of my life, since my very early twenties, and I’ve never been told about double spacing. A single tap on the space-bar when typing this gives a perfectly good space after a full-point. Doing a double space, like I’ve just done at the beginning of this sentence, look too much, quite frankly.
I’ll try to remember this when I go back to work on Tuesday, and ask someone I’ve worked with for all that time, as he is pretty sharp on typography and getting it right.

It’s never been a design thing. It’s always been an admin thing, used to teach it in admin classes at my school./

Glad I don’t work with you. Ridiculous behaviour!

Do bear in mind that all it takes to re do a document is a global search and replace so it’s not much of a hardship.

I’m 55 and was taught single space at school.

gonefishin – Member

Glad I don’t work with you. Ridiculous behaviour!

Do bear in mind that all it takes to re do a document is a global search and replace so it’s not much of a hardship.

Find and Replace. Simple!

scotroutes – Member

I’m 55 and was taught single space at school.

But did you take typing class? If you did then you would find that the textbooks say double spacing after full stop.

For what it is worth, wiki cites several respected typography and style guides, including the “Chicago Manual of Style” and the “Oxford Style Manual” (aka Hart’s Rules) and they agree on single space:

With the advent of the computer age, typographers began deprecating double spacing, even in monospaced text. In 1989, Desktop Publishing by Design stated that “typesetting requires only one space after periods, question marks, exclamation points, and colons”, and identified single sentence spacing as a typographic convention.[34] Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works (1993) and Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography (2006) both indicate that uniform spacing should be used between words, including between sentences.[35]

More recent works on typography weigh in strongly. Ilene Strizver, founder of the Type Studio, says, “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.”[13] The Complete Manual on Typography (2003) states that “The typewriter tradition of separating sentences with two word spaces after a period has no place in typesetting” and the single space is “standard typographic practice”.[36] The Elements of Typographic Style (2004) advocates a single space between sentences, noting that “your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint [double spacing] Victorian habit.”[6]

David Jury’s book, About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography (2004)—published in Switzerland—clarifies the contemporary typographic position on sentence spacing:

Word spaces, preceding or following punctuation, should be optically adjusted to appear to be of the same value as a standard word space. If a standard word space is inserted after a full point or a comma, then, optically, this produces a space of up to 50% wider than that of other word spaces within a line of type. This is because these punctuation marks carry space above them, which, when added to the adjacent standard word spaces, combines to create a visually larger space. Some argue that the “additional” space after a comma and full point serves as a “pause signal” for the reader. But this is unnecessary (and visually disruptive) since the pause signal is provided by the punctuation mark itself.[37]

…

..style guides began changing their guidance on sentence spacing. The 1969 edition of the Chicago Manual of Style used em spaces between sentences in its text;[41] by the 2003 edition it had changed to single sentence spacing for both manuscript and print. By the 1980s, the United Kingdom’s Hart’s Rules (1983)[42] had shifted to single sentence spacing. Other style guides followed suit in the 1990s.[43] Soon after the beginning of the 21st century, the majority of style guides had changed to indicate that only one word space was proper between sentences.

— http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing

That’s good enough for me. 😀

I’ve worked in design and print for pretty much all of my life, since my very early twenties, and I’ve never been told about double spacing.

Are you still in your early twenties?

A double space after a full-stop is no different to proper spelling and punctuation. All part of writing English correctly; to make sure it is clear, accurate and understood.