Double spacing after a full stop?

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.

Nonsense. It’s an outdated style thing.

We should be more concerned with the incorrect usage of hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes.

That’s how I was taught at school

I was taught to use a pen and inkwell at school. I don’t recall double spacing being mentioned.

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.

Despite the fact that the standard style guides, which are concerned far more than most about proper punctuation, typography and written English, all say that a single space is now correct? 😀

Styles change. Just because you were taught something in typing class 50 odd years ago doesn’t mean that is the standard now.

We should be more concerned with the incorrect usage of hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes.

And don’t get me started on people that use … instead of … 🙂

…why?

My options selections (allegedly) meant I ‘had’ to take typing at school (proper typewriters). That must be where the ‘correct’ use of double space came from for me. And actually being one of only two guys in a class of 14 year old girls turned out a lot better than I expected. Still can’t touch type though.

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

+1. It’s an obsolete rule that serves no purpose other than to enable the person observing it (or even worse requiring its observance) to demonstrate their knowledge of it. It’s a shibboleth…for strokers.

It’s very, very wrong, unless you are using a typewriter. I find it makes me irrationally annoyed. Almost as much as people using direct formatting instead of learning to use styles.

Almost as much as people using direct formatting instead of learning to use styles.

I’ve always found accessing and modifying styles in MS Word so counterintutive that I can understand why people don’t use them.

Alt+0133 … GrahamS, thanks, didn’t know about that

I did a touch typing course in 1997 and we were taught to double space, so I’ve been doing it ever since. In a previous job the house style forbade the use of double spaces, but it was still easier to write my copy and then go back and remove the extra spaces than to break the habit. With touch typing you go into ‘the zone’, where you don’t think about what your fingers are doing at all. If you do, your speed drops and typos happen. I reckon that’s why people still double space, it’s just too hard to stop doing it.

You can include as many spaces as you like on the web and the browser will strip them out anyway.

^there are almost 100 spaces in that sentence^

Doesn’t                 work             for                   me?

😉

Single space after a full stop is an Americanism.

Two spaces makes the text easier to read.

Nonsense. It’s an outdated style thing.
We should be more concerned with the incorrect usage of hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes.
[/quote]

Not to mention writing a sentence without a subject.

When I text with my phone, keying a double space always inserts a full stop.

No it’s wrong (unless you are still using a typewriter). I find it is normally done sloppily anyway, so remove them from any document I review.

Single space after a full stop is an Americanism.

Why is it called French Spacing then? 😀

And why is it recommended practise in the very British “Oxford Style Manual”, the European Union’s “Interinstitutional Style Guide” and the European Commission’s “English Style Guide”?

Two spaces makes the text easier to read.

Despite the studies that say it doesn’t?

no statistically significant results were found. The Ni et al. (2004) study was interested in testing the differences among groups of students randomly assigned to the same reading materials, but with different spacing after a sentence period. Ni et al. also resulted in a lack of statistical significance.

— http://www.aect.org/events/review/PropResults.asp?submit=View+Full+Proposal.&propid=148

Damnit           GrahamS           broke           my           browser           !

As someone who’s properly educated in typography, and who spends a considerable amount of my life typesetting (and I’m ridiculously OCD about having it ‘just right’), if you supplied me with copy and it had double spaces in it, you’d be lucky to escape with your life!

It normally goes hand in hand with asking to justify the type in the ranks of annoying typographic idiocy. If you asked for both, I’d make sure they’d never even find your body!

GrahamS had the correct answer back on the first page.

Double spacing is a throwback to monospaced fonts where a letter m and a letter i are the same width. With modern proportional fonts it’s unnecessary and considered bad form.

As someone else noted, STW will strip out double-spaces; that’s actually a Web thing rather than specific to here, web browsers will strip multiple spaces when rendering HTML (unless you explicitly tell it not to in the page’s markup).

I can’t help but double-space, but then I spent over a decade using computers with monospaced fonts (from the ZX Spectrum to green-screen PR1ME minicomputers) and twice as long on Mono so it’s a hard habit to break.

When I text with my phone, keying a double space always inserts a full stop.

That’s just a convenient shortcut, you won’t actually get two spaces (unless you press it a third time).