Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period

He's amusingly wrong in his certainty that everybody else is wrong.

Two spaces grew out of a typographic convention of using a 1.5-width space that was favored by typesetters for proportional typespaces because typewriters didn't have half-width spaces represented on their keyboards. The actually "correct" approach would be 1.5-character width spaces, because even in proportional typefaces a little extra space serves as a useful visual cue that aids in quicker text scanning by eye.

The modern convention of using a single space is the result of journalistic publishers' desire for economy of printing paper. It costs more -- either money for extra pages or characters that won't fit on a page -- to have two (or even 1.5) spaces between sentences. For that reason, a new convention for non-personal correspondence arose, not out of "correctness" or readability concerns, but out of the miserliness of accountants.

As for the lack of studies, that's because it's pretty difficult to come up with a meaningful set of criteria that can be (relatively) easily measured in such a study. Worse, the people with both the resources and interest necessary to fund such studies are for the most part not interested in finding out their cost-saving measures make it harder to read their publications. People I know who read a lot -- who enjoy reading -- including myself all agree, though: having more than a single (proportional or otherwise) character width of space between sentences helps with making it easier to read quickly without having to backtrack and without missing things. In fact, if anything proportional typefaces makes the problem worse, because the spacing between sentences tends to end up smaller than it would otherwise be.

For all his annoying certainty that people who are certain of their disagreement with him are annoyingly wrong, Farhad Manjoo is pretty laughably lacking in the proud correctness he claims.

Articles with the word "never" in the title: Beware their myopia, lack of vision, and narrow-mindedness.

Articles with the word "ever" in the title: Beware their gross generalizations, lack of gray area, and hasty conclusions.

Articles with both the words "never" and "ever" in the title: Never, ever read them. (oops)

Amusing: his argument is that authorities say to use one, so use one. He then refutes arguments by others that they learned to use two spaces from their authorities, so they do. "That's wrong!" he says.

There is no argument of value in this article.

Years ago, working on GNU documentation, RMS instructed me to use two spaces. The documents were processed into HTML, TeX, Texinfo, and plain text, the former two of which auto-collapsed two spaces into one, and the latter two of which were often viewed with a monospace font, thus benefiting from the extra space.

I carried this practice over into the rest of my writing, although recently I have noticed that some web systems do not auto-collapse two spaces, and when filling out forms online I've generally reverted back to using single spaces to ensure proper spacing.

I'm a couple of years younger than Julian Assange and commonly use two spaces after each sentence, purely out of muscle memory. (I took a "keyboarding" class in 1987 or so using an IBM Selectric typewriter and that's the way I was taught to do it.)

I'm not at all surprised that many people still do this. I'm a little surprised that people assert that's a "proper" way to do it or for that matter get worked up enough about it to write that you should "never, ever" do it. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I was expecting an actual negative consequence of using two spaces. Typography is important, but I'd guess that with modern kerning techniques the difference between two spaces and one is slight. (In fact, if I were designing a word processing app, I'd think this is is a case I'd account for: If there is a "proper" distance between the period at the end of one sentence and the start of the next letter, wouldn't you ensure that's the distance that is used whether the user typed one space or two?)

This is a matter of encoding. It's got nothing to do with typography. Typesetting software should do the right thing. There aren't any rules for spacing apart from what the font designer specified.

Of course, the software has to understand what it is that it is typesetting, and the font needs to define spacing in such a way that the typesetting software can do things as intended, so the specification for authors here is really defined by the software. If it wants two spaces after a period, then give it two. If it wants one, then give it one.

I suspect that most software expects one.

In a fully pedantic world, we'd have different unicode code points for "gap between word", "gap after sentence", and presumably others to cover every situation, and the font designer would then have full control.

Talk about getting worked up over nothing. Must have had a deadline for a column and nothing better to write about.

I use a double space after a period. Always have. I also still use monospaced fonts for almost any composing I do, because I use Emacs whenever possible for that kind of thing.

Any normal text layout software (a browser rendering HTML, TeX) is going to ignore whitespace in the source anyway.

I think this guy needs to get clear on the distinctions between typewriting, typesetting, and word processing. If you're typing on a typewriter, it sounds like it's generally considered admissible to use two (monospaced) spaces after a word.

As far as typesetting goes, TeX makes an inter-sentence space a bit wider (but less than 2x) than an inter-word space, unless you tell it otherwise. Since I trust Knuth more than this guy, I suspect that's at least considered typographically admissible.

If you're using a word processor with a monospaced font, it seems like it makes sense to follow the typewriter convention (two spaces between sentences). If you're using a word processor with a proportional font, and you want to follow the TeX typesetting convention, I think you're stuck: it's not trivial for a computer to distinguish between an inter-sentence space and an inter-word space (because of things like "etc."). So if you use a single space between sentences, it's going to be smaller than it would be in the typeset document, and if you use a double space, it's going to be larger than it would be in the typeset document. Or you could conveniently decide to follow the "french spacing" convention, in which inter-sentence spaces are the same size as inter-word spaces. Which is apparently what the author favors.

As both a hacker and a hack writer, I follow William Shunn's manuscript format: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html

"In the days of typewriters, the usual practice was to put two spaces after the end of every sentence, and also to put two spaces after every colon. This helped make the separations between sentences more apparent, and helped editors more easily distinguish periods from commas and colons from semicolons. With the dominance of computers, that practice is changing, and it is more common now to see only one space between sentences.

"Ingrained habits die hard, though, so if you're used to hitting the spacebar twice after a period, you shouldn't stress out about it, particularly if you're using a Courier font."

The MLA handbook has some interesting information about spacing after the period. Here is section 3.2.12 "Spacing after Concluding Punctuation marks" in my physical copy of the sixth edition.

Publications in the United States today usually have the same spacing after a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark, or an exclamation point as between words on the same line. Since word processors make available the same fonts used by typesetters for printed works, many writers, influenced by the look of typeset publications, now leave only one space after a concluding punctuation mark. In addition, most publishers' guidelines for preparing a manuscript on disk ask professional authors to type only the spaces that are to appear in print.

Because it is increasingly common for papers and manuscripts to be prepared with a single space after all concluding punctuation marks, this spacing is shown in the examples in this handbook. As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor requests that you do otherwise. Whichever spacing you choose, be sure to use it consistently in all parts of your paper--the works-cited list as well as the main text. By contrast, internal punctuation marks, such as a colon, a comma, and a semicolon, should always be followed by one space.

HTML removes extra spaces. I used a double space there, but you only see a single space. Since much of what people read these days is HTML, that's going to become what people expect to see, so I expect single spacing to become the standard. I bet that will have more of an effect on changing people's minds than "expert" opinions.

I had a real hard time determining if this article was serious or a sarcastic rant against people who get overwrought on trivialities.

>in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left.

Those are both examples of arbitrary decisions carried forward by inertia and slavish adherence to dogma. Makes me strongly believe the two space rule is another example. I read most, skimmed rest (it was kind of hard to find sentence breaks actually) of article but I found no argument or justification other than "typographers" say it's so.

I also frequently use monospaced fonts. So, author and these unquoted/unspecified typographers he claims to speak for can kiss my shiny double-spaced ass.

Anyone feel like they name dropped Assange for extra views?

What a useless pedantic article, how did this get to the top of the HN front page?

I often type two spaces because it was drilled into me when I learned touch typing at 14 years of age. Very hard to unlearn that. Unusually I also had a Dad who was a layout designer, so I knew a lot about typography including that you only use a single space when laying type. Still f'ing hard to overcome the double space which is done completely reflexively by fast touch typists.

Wikipedia has a much more comprehensive review of the issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing

In general, modern typesetting software (and/or fonts) should be able to properly set the width of spaces between sentences to be slightly wider than than those between words. Unfortunately, TeX is the only common typesetter I know that does this.

I like how he so emphatically says that it is wrong, and cites style guides that say it's OK to use 2 spaces.

From the HLA source he cited (http://www.mla.org/style_faq3): "... As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor requests that you do otherwise."

It seems to me, and Wikipedia seems to confirm, that single spaces after a period used to be called "French spacing" or "French bands". It was not standard US practice in the days of hot type or even photo type.

If the MLA says one space then it has changed since I was in school (~10 years ago). We were always told to use a double space at the end of a sentence and while he links to the Chicago MLA, the actual MLA website also eludes to the fact that it used to be two spaces: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3.

I guess we've solved all the other world problems?

Multiple consecutive spaces == 1 space, in the same way 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Put another way, 3 x 0 is not greater than 1 x 0. Even in typography or typesetting, the goal is to provide a single space, but to do it in a proportion to the surrounding letters that is appropriate for the context. This goal isn't any less important when an inflexible typesetting environment forces you to use a narrow range of discreet units.

I've edited too many documents to count, but in nearly all cases, it was a default software setting that inserted extra space after a period, before the next sentence. The author can't reliably claim to know how much space Assange chose to use, any more than he can affect how his own text will be presented after it is processed for publication. It's an implementation detail that often gets transformed (by software and/or humans) as it makes its way through various systems.

I was taught to use two spaces.   Apparently there was a reformation of the the double space rule sometime thereafter.    I would expect to be informed about such an important change in English grammar through a high exposure world-wide public announcement campaign. Considering that the use of double spaces separating sentences can provoke such ridicule, there really needs to be a global effort to educate all English speaking citizens of Earth.     Perhaps even training centers could be erected where people could be taught this new important change to the language.       These centers could perhaps even treat those who have been subject to the extreme psychological trauma of the public ridicule caused by the misuse of the space.

It already irritated me that he says I'm wrong after a lifetime of typing - but then he goes on to misspell "Ay yi yi". Does he think that was a piratical saying? Wouldn't you think someone obsessed with punctuation would at least care a little about spelling?

You know, there are things to worry about, and things not to worry about, and unless you are printing a book, whether or not people use 1 or 2 spaces after a period really isn't something you need to worry about.

I was taught to add two spaces after a period, and I have no plans to stop doing so. If people really want to complain, I suppose I can show them the latest edition of the APA style guide, which made two spaces the recommendation again, or MLA, which suggests one but notes that "as a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks".

Of course, maybe the author isn't as dumb as he sounds... He found a way to get paid to complain about spacing, after all.

Why you should always, always use two spaces after a full-stop (when writing for online use):

1. Because it remains correct in monospace, and 2. Because no HTML rendering engine displays the second one anyway.

This man's rather ill-informed about the 'tech' part of his 'tech column' gig.

This is a trend I've noticed a lot lately on articles on typography and design - they're very light on 'why' and pretty much just invoke appeals to authority - "my design school taught me to do it this way, QED."

There is a good reason to use one space, and that is that when you're typing, you're only creating text, not typesetting. Software does the typesetting now, and will automatically space out sentences in a way that looks right. You don't need to do it yourself, just like you don't need to enter manual linebreaks anymore.

One of the first things I do when laying out a publication is to find/replace "__" with "_". It's mainly for the sake of consistency; I always receive documents that have a mix of both.

From the article:

"Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability."

...So, there's absolutely no evidence, yet everyone who doesn't agree is 'certainly' wrong...

He just taught me that I'm supposed to uses two spaces after a period when doing most of my writing.. in programs.. which are still usually viewed with fixed width fonts.

It always amazes me how cultural differences find their ways in the oddest little details. I had never heard of the 2 space rule until I moved to the US, and only recently did I realize that the question mark was missing its preceding space... I had to do a bit a research and I'm relieved to read that the ellipsis can still be used to indicate a pause, or a trailing off thought.

I've used two spaces for a while now. It just feels right that sentences have more space between them than "Mr." has after it.

But there's one annoying, persistent browser bug that cramps my style. If a line wraps after the first of two spaces, the second space will be on the next line, which looks terrible: http://i.imgur.com/MksV7.png

Using two spaces after the end of a sentence allows software to recognize sentences without doubt. There are no heuristics involved which would always be on the verge of failing. That allows me to issue commands which works on sentences mindlessly, and to enable auto-capitalization. The former is the killer feature.

I was hoping the reason would be something interesting like 'we used forensic analysis of punctuation habits to determine the author of certain documents,' and it seems that it was going that way with the Julian Assange bit.

Then it rapidly devolved into argumentum ad nauseum and appeal to authority; I was very disappointed.

To sum up:

- Some use two spaces because they are used to it. They are wrong, stupid and annoying.

- Author use two spaces because he's used to it. Why can't you see that he is correct?

To give an actual argument related to value, I think it is helpful to differentiate between periods that end sentences and periods that end abbreviations.

I've always been a single spacer. I understood the purpose in monospace, I otherwise never understood the practice. Almost everyone I've heard only practices it because that's how they learned. That reason wasn't good enough, especially when that was (mostly) rooted in the typewriter, and we're using the modern day computer. Some (justified) reasons are enlightening.

I was always under the impression that in a proper typeset manuscript, sentence spacing should be slightly wider than a standard single space. Typographers make this change when they typeset right? Isn't there an alternate ASCII character for this purpose (entirely not sure, I might be thinking of special characters in certain fonts)

My problem is with teachers who insist on using double spaces after a period. I have had a few teachers in recent years demand double space and will not accept papers that do not use the convention. Because it feels entirely unnatural for me to hit the space bar twice, I can never remember to do it consistently. I just wrote a python script to convert it for me afterwards.

On a similar note, I got a 0 on a paper once because it was not in the required font, Times New Roman. I had written it on my netbook while on vacation and printed directly from it and had not realized that the Linux distro installed automatically called Liberation Serif "Times New Roman" inside of Abiword.

After reading some of the comments, I've decided to only use two spaces from now on.

This is amusingly relevant for me. I had a number of bug reports for my November app Quick Brown Frog (http://quickbrownfrog.com) from people complaining of low speed scores, due to their two-space habit (all my source texts are formatted to use a single space, and they're displayed in fixed-width).

I considered reformatting all the text to use double-spaces, but then figured that I'd get an equal number of complaints from the single-spacers (little-endians?)

In the end I changed the code to ignore the double space if received as input. No complaints after that. :-)

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Section 2.1.4 – Use a single word space between sentences.

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation.

HTML's smooshing two spaces together was offensive to me in the 90s when I was learning it after being a touch typist since I was 7 years old. I still double space, but no one knows unless they view source.

I do 3 spaces now. Working myself up to 4.

I set lead type as a hobby, and I can tell you the entire concept of a "space character" does not exist in typesetting. Space is not made of characters, it's made of space (in metal, it's made of tiny shims of copper, brass, or lead).

Any use of the space bar in a computer typesetting context is just a hint to some algorithm regarding how much space you want put between the characters on either side. TeX doesn't put "1.5 spaces" between sentences; it puts glue that is slightly stretchier than the glue it puts between words.

Hi Everyone, I am a two spacer between sentences, and a triple spacer for paragraph starters, and a newline between paragraphs. No wonder nobody reads my emails. :-)

For me, the second space after the period is a wasted byte. The same applies for the just one space after the period if you are actually moving to the next paragraph (just a CR+LF) is enough (more than enough in Unix).

But what I really dislike is the preceeding space before the question mark. That really messes up my brain sentence parser (and many word processos too).

Every style guide I've read (I don't have a citation handy) says that either convention is acceptable, as long as you're consistent throughout the document. This is the first article I've ever seen that said two spaces is wrong, and I am not convinced. (However, I will continue to use one space, because I think it just looks better.)

I envision this becoming an Oatmeal comic.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/period.htm

  This is a prob. I tested!

This is a problem I tested!

  This is a prob.  I tested!

This is a problem. I tested!

It suddenly occurs to me to ask whether those friends will ever invite him to dinner with them again. He turned their friendly dinner conversation into an excuse to call them Luddites stuck in the 19th century.

"You're off my Thanksgiving invitation list, Farhad."

What does it matter, word processors format this automatically, right? I was taught this rule in primary school I think, but have never used it (two-spacing). Slows down typing speed to much.

Two spaces sound weird, but my biggest gripe with the typewriter legacy is the QWERTY layout and it's prevalence. (yes, I'm a dvorak typer by choice, re-learned it after QWERTY).

This is a software problem. Programs that display proportional text should recognize one or more spaces after a period as a sentence break and should render appropriately.

Now I feel stupid for feeling bad about being a spelling nazi. This is just so much more sophisticated :)

I always put two spaces after a period in grade school because I wanted my papers to appear longer.

I had never heard of the 2 space rule until I moved to the US, so this is one of cultural things. I believe "single space" rule is prevalent is Europe and India.

This anyway points that 2 space rule is not "right way" since significant portion of the world (maybe majority of your customers) will think it is weird and be confused about it. The "1 space rule" is more neutral.

I felt compelled to look at the source and search for '.[space][space]'

At least they take their own advice.

When I see two spaces, especially in proportional text, I use it as evidence of the writer being a luddite or "past it". Only one piece of evidence, not conclusive. Probably most of its explanatory power comes from it being an indicator the user is old, educated in typing with a typewriter.

Worse than using two spaces is using no spaces at all. Intolerable.

Always wondered why I preferred Courier in command line

signed,

-a die hard two spacer

How the hell is his personality anyway related to the news/facts going out of wikileaks or its credibility?

It seems that the reason it's wrong is that typographers say it is. The author has not given an actual reason, other than appeal to authority.

I will continue to double-space until I'm dead.

I pretty much decided from the title alone that I will begin to use double space just to piss the author off. After reading the article I'm sure that I made the right decision.

Real men use tabs.

If two spaces is right and one space is wrong, why is it that I just opened up a half dozen books and saw that they only use single spaces? If two spaces is better for readability, why can't I find books using two spaces?