No clear double-space era ever gave way to a single-space era - hence the ongoing debate.Īnecdotally, most people my age (a millennial born in 1986) remember learning to double space after a period in elementary school, even though we worked in word processors. When did double space after a period change? You can be sure, though, there were probably some opinionated publishers carrying on about it in some town square somewhere in the 1700s. So, bottom line, we don’t know why we double space after a period - or ever did. That study is legit, but, the Washington Post reports, studies over the years have yielded conflicting results.
You might have read about the 2018 study published in the journal “Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics” and reported by the Atlantic, which crowned two spaces the winner for helping participants read slightly faster. The double space - and other defunct sentence spacing - existed before the typewriter, and some typesetters as far back as the 18th century used the single space.Īnother fun fact from Felici: In the 1960s, electronic phototypesetting systems got the jump on Microsoft Editor and automatically collapsed double spaces into single. Digital-age word processors and content management systems use variable-width fonts (what you’re reading now), so periods hug tight to a sentence’s end, and one space leaves plenty of breathing room before the next begins.īut the debate existed long before word processors came along, journalist and editor James Felici detailed in an essay. The logic goes: An extra space after a period helped distinguish one sentence from another in a typewriter’s fixed-width typeface (similar to the font Courier New). Most modern lore cites typewriters as a practical explanation for the double-space habit. Some legal writers still insist on two spaces, as well, but the American Bar Association recommends a single space. Of the major guides, APA Style - which guides some academic writing - was the lone hold out in the two-spaces camp until 2018, when its seventh edition finally recommended one space. Writers and editors tend to have serious feelings about grammar, style and usage - like whether the Oxford comma is necessary - but any editor worth her salt will admit no single rule about how we write is universally correct or incorrect. But no Grammar Goddess has ever carved this or any rule into stone. It’s one of hundreds of miniscule style choices publishers, writers, editors and style guides make about their content. Most style guides, which lay out the norms for how industries including book publishers, newspapers and academics write, have made the switch to favor a single space between sentences. Two spaces after a period is not incorrect - nor is it correct.
Is a double space after a period actually incorrect?
How to fix sentence spacing between words in word 2007 update#
The update is included with the premium version of the company’s new Editor, a browser extension and new Word feature that makes spelling, grammar and style suggestions akin to tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid. Word will now flag two spaces after a period with that dreaded Spellcheck-style squiggly line and suggest a single space to replace it, The Verge reports. Its verdict? Two spaces after a period is out. Maybe this will snuff the flames on this decades-old dumpster fire: Microsoft Word, that powerhouse in word processing, has finally weighed in on the great space debate.
I know you’re duty-bound as a wordsmith to engage in a raging debate about sentence spacing now that I’ve brought it up. Sorry for derailing your day and that of the poor non-writers in your household. So…how many spaces after a period is correct?ĭo you use one or two spaces after a period?
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