The Millions

Curiosities

How Many Spaces After A Period?

1. Paul Lamb
   at 12:42 pm on January 24, 2011

   Some of us knew that sooner than others. Old habits die hard, especially ones for which the practitioners cannot give a good justification, likely since they’ve never considered their automatic and unconsidered adherence.

2. Peter
   at 12:46 pm on January 24, 2011

   Well… not quite “totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably.” The “two spaces” rule was adopted with the advent of the typewriter. It helped, along with various punctuation marks, to set off the end of one sentence from the beginning of the next as a reader scanned the words. This was needed because typewriters for decades created what’s called “monospaced” printing. Each character occupied the same amount of space on the line. Most of the time, that was either 1/10 or 1/12 of an inch. This was unnatural for the reader. Hand writing is not monospaced, nor is type that is set for books and magazines, where the rule is one space between sentences.

   Nowadays, though, many people’s printed words are in typefaces that use what’s called “proportional” spacing (this blog is one of them), so, in those cases, one space is correct. However, if you are certain that your words will be sent out to the world in monospaced type (and there are still a few places like that out there, even on the web), then using two spaces would not be inappropriate. After all, anything that makes it easier for the reader to read your words is a good thing.

   I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it?

3. DN
   at 3:02 am on January 25, 2011

   Peter, that’s precisely right! Perfect.

   I can’t believe how much coverage this silly Slate article has gotten. It’s the same sort of prideful ignorance, bolstered by selective citation, that it’s supposedly dethroning.