No More Double Spaces!
I may have addressed this already, but in the interests of both my sanity and new readers of my blog, I’m going to take it up again.
Repeat after me: it is no longer the convention to place two spaces between sentences.
To my amazement, this seems to be one of the most difficult changes to the way we produce copy for people to accept. And some simply don’t. One of my consulting clients, a marketing firm, has two very highly placed employees who refuse to believe me and continue to place the two spaces between sentences despite my constant and no doubt annoying entreaties to remove one of them. They’re both old enough to have taken typing classes on typewriters, so I’ll cut them a very little slack; but other clients, far younger, are having the same difficulty.
Yet there’s not a single usage guide today that advocates doing so. In fact, a colleague of mine tells me that when he was learning typesetting in 1954 he was told to not insert two spaces!
Typewriters use fixed-width or monosized fonts. Computer fonts (with the exception of Courier, meant to duplicate the look of a typewriter) do not. Treating computers like typewriters –– and making the assumption that rules that work with one will work with the other — is just plain silly.
There are a few resources out there that deal with this particular issue along with other transitions from fixed-font to variable-font devices: Robin Williams’ two books, The Mac is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Macintosh (as well as an edition for PC users) are excellent if a little dated (they came out as revised editions in 1995).
A succinct summary of the convention is available in an article in Upper and Lower Case Magazine, Double Spaces Between Sentences … NOT!, in which the author, Ilene Strizver, notes,
Conversely, nearly all computer fonts (except Courier) have proportional spacing, which means that the width of the characters and the spacing surrounding them are in proportion to each other. Proportional spacing results in a more even, balanced appearance. Because of this, a single space is enough to create the necessary visual separation between sentences.
So … don’t do it. One space after punctuation (periods are most frequently abused, though some writers add double spaces after colons, semicolons, and even commas as well) is the current law of the publishing land. Don’t make your manuscript stand out because of its errors, especially one as easily fixed as this one (a global search-and-replace will take care of it nicely).
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, Usage on June 29th, 2008