Two Spaces After a Period – It’s Time to Stop

It's New Year's Day 2015 as I write this. The roads in Lubbock covered in a sheet of ice and my wife taking a nap on the couch, so I'm editing my book for a second printing and I realized that I've made a huge writer's sin. Well, actually, a lot of them. I'll save the others for some later blog post.

Throughout the book (as well as throughout this blog and in emails I write and pretty much anything that I type,) I frequently find myself putting two spaces after periods and other sentence ending punctuation. When I first wrote the book, Kyle Word, my writing coach, editor, sounding board, and literary savant, told me to stop doing using two periods (explanation below.) So I did. At least I thought I did. I was wrong. Well over half of the sentences in the 150 page book have two spaces after every sentence.

So Why Do We Use Two Spaces?

I know what you're thinking. The same thing I thought when this first came up. "No way, Jose! I was taught by Mrs. ___________ (fill in the blank with the name of your junior high typing teacher) to always put two spaces at the end of a sentence."

My favorite comment on this comes from blogger Jennifer Gonzales at Cult of Pedagogy:

"Nothing says over 40 like two spaces after a period."

Those of us who still use two spaces after a period do it because back when we were using plain ol' typewriters, that's how we were taught. And back then we had to do it. It's because typewriters us monospaced fonts. Every letter, from the i to the w, used the exact same amount of space on the page. Even the period used the same space as the W. Because of this, we needed an extra space after sentence ending punctuation to help indicate that the sentence had some to a conclusion and a new sentence was beginning.

In the modern world of computers and home systems were people have more typesetting horsepower than most newspapers did in the 1980s, Consequently, we have the luxury of proportional fonts where periods and other smaller symbols and letters take up less space than larger ones like W and G. Therefore, we don't need that extra space to indicate the end of a sentence.

Need More Proof?

This isn't just the opinion of Kyle and Jennifer, though. This is actually the industry standard. Let's take a look at some references:

The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, page 308:

"Punctuation and space—one space or two? In typeset matter, one space, not two should be used between two sentences—whether the first ends in a period, a question mark, an exclamation point, or a closing quotation mark or parenthesis."

The Associated Press Stylebook, 2009, page 361 (reference from Wikipedia, I don't actually have access to this book.)

Modern Language Association's MLA Style Manual, 2008, page 99:

"Because it is increasingly common for manuscripts to be prepared with a single space after all concluding punctuation marks, this spacing is recommended and shown in the examples in this manual."

The Quick Takeaway

No one is going to fine you for putting two spaces at the end of a sentence in your blog or your email. If you want to publish your works or you're doing some kind of formal writing, though, you might want to consider limiting the spaces to just one so that your editor or printer doesn't have to clean up after you (or worse, send it back to you for corrections.)

To keep myself from having to try to remember to use only one space for published writing while I continue to use two spaces in my informal writing, I'm going to my it my New Year's Resolution to try to use only one space. I won't be perfect at it, but surely I'll get better.