Space spaceFollow

I do sometimes, when I remember to. Current usage, from what I've read, is that you can double or single space at the end of sentence. Also, you can now put your punctuation inside or outside of a quote. With this one, just go with whatever I think looks less awkward.

I was taught you can do either (single or double space after a period). That was back about a decade ago, so it's not -that- new.

I've only every put one space after punctuation. That's the only way I was ever taught to do it, though.

Font studies and words like "kerning" make my eyes cross, and I then black out for a spell.

I was taught to double space back in the day. Still do it out of habit, but yeah, I've heard that it's already accounted for already in word processors.

Alas, no.

I heard of it when I was starting high school and took a typing class. Of course, the person that said it typed slower than I did and all the extra credit I was assigned gave me a 251 average for the year so take it for what you will.

I want to say that the MLA tells you to double space for research papers... but it's been a few years since I took that class. In any case, school papers are the only time I double space.

For what it's worth, we sent off a manuscript to PNAS at the end of last month; there wasn't any double-spacing.

Double lol

Wrong kind of double space

Later printers, yes. The origin of the double space actually goes back to the original old block style printing presses. Different blocks were used for different sized spaces, with the largest block used to separate sentences. The reasoning was because letter blocks were the same regardless of what was around them, which creates gaps in a sentence depending on which letters are adjacent to each other. A larger space was necessary to signify the end of a sentence. Since the letter before that space was small (a "."), it created a large and unmistakable space.

Early typewriters were not only fixed in terms of the letters themselves but also monoscale (each letter took the same width on the page). The normal gaps between letters were even more variable and noticeable than on block printers. Thus, the convention of double spacing began to emulate the effect of using the largest block space between sentences that most people were used to seeing.


Unless you're typing with a fixed letter monospaced font, there's no reason to double space after a period for legibility. Some people do it just because that's what they were taught, but it's completely unnecessary 99% of the time. And as a couple people have pointed out, html automatically strips out the extra spaces anyway, so even if you do type them on this forum, they wont show up.



On the topic of strange writing habits though, I've got a dozy. Not sure where this friend of mine developed the habit, but he would do what he called a "soft return" when typing. Instead of letting the document software he was using manage word wrap, when he felt he was too close to the end of a line to fit the next word, he would hit the space bar until the cursor wrapped to the start of the next line, then continue typing. Of course, this inserted arbitrary numbers of spaces in his document, which looked fine if you were using the same software he used in the same font, with the same size. Of course, when I needed to take several dozen documents he'd written (on his Mac), and edit them on my PC, and print them out. Yeah. That was... "fun".

I don't even remember high school english class.

my iPhone will auto punctuate if I double space :D