How many spaces are there after a period

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Get Published. Build My Platform. Find a Fiction Agent. Find a Nonfiction Agent. Write My Query. Sell My Work. Status quo. 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? While a lot of hay is made about using the number of spaces a person puts between sentences to determine how old they are, it is actually not all that simple. Whether you fall firmly on the side of the single space, or you remain true to your double-space roots, it actually has more to do with how you initially learned to type than your age. If you learned on a typewriter or word processor you most likely fall into the Double Space Club.

For those who learned to type on a computer, single-spacing has probably always been the norm and probably why single spacers find themselves so devout about their spacing: it is the only method they have ever known. Although there has been plenty of back-and-forth on the topic, a recent study may have concluded why many people still prefer seeing a double space between sentences: that extra space can help you read faster.

While it may only cut down on reading time by a few seconds, some people can find that time invaluable. 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. Single pixel periods are not the most visible graphic conceived. As for typewriters, I never used them for anything but play. I am over 40 but have used computers since a very young age.

Distinguishing between a comma and a period is easier with two spaces after a period. Early 40 column displays did not have this issue as the font was so very large. Sadly, not everyone has the same literacy level I do. All your ranting just shows that you are the one behind the times. How lovely to be able to put a young whipper-snapper in her place.

Clearly, I am over It is only a number and, hopefully, affords me some sort of respectability, at least for longevity. But I do double space after the punctuation of a sentence. The theory that placing extra spacing at the end of a sentence originated with the advent of the typewriter and its monotype spaced fonts has been around for years, but I believe it is wrong.

The tradition of placing extra spacing after periods and other end-of-sentence punctuation marks is much, much older. Indeed there are examples to be found in the books of the incunabula.

Bembo, published by Aldus Manutius, Although there was not a fixed practice using extra spacing after periods during the early centuries of printing, it is not difficult to find examples in every age. By the 19th century the practice was firmly established. Pick up almost any book from that era and you will find the extra spacing.

So I submit that the early typists were simply following the practice that was common in their day. Whether or not it is a practice that should be continued is a separate question. Comtempory book publishers have universally abandoned the practice, and I suspect that this abandoment will continue to spread. Frankly, issues like this irk me. The main people perpetrating this myth are the something college journalist students.

So, then they become 2-space Nazis, trying to bully their opinion on everyone else in the world. Reading some of these posts, two spaces has historically been the rule far longer than any recent one-space trend. We should not change history because of technology unless it is a really big win. In this case, I think people are just becoming lazy. With more high-tech typing devices like mobile phones and tablets, people are typing with their thumbs, typing while driving bad idea or typing so quickly to get a quick message out that quality suffers.

While single spaces separate words, I think double spaces should separate sentences, it reinforces that the thought sentence is complete.

It helps it stand out and I think it reinforces clearer writing, clearer reading and clearer sentence construction. Also, carriage returns breaks, new lines, line feeds, or whatever should separate paragraphs, for the same reasons. These are the building blocks of written communication and they should each have their own unique separator. My wife is from Thailand, and the Thai written language has no punctuation. It also has no spaces between words, sentences or paragraphs.

It just just one, constant flow of uninterrupted text. Or in Thai — itisjustoneconstantflowofuninterruptedtext — super annoying. Any direction we move closer to this even as subtle as changing double spaces to singe spaces is a move in the wrong direction! Historically about 1,5 space was used. It closes, divides and opens. Do you require so much emphasis on the division? It creates unnecessary pauses and an increased awareness of the typography while good typography should be invisible.

I would absolutely prefer not to read a whole book with double spaces, just like I would absolutely prefer not to read a book set in a Didone typeface or with too much leading or with too much letter- or word spacing and I could name more typographic principles.