Two Space or Not Two Space – that is the question…
Well, that used to be the question. Now, that question has been emphatically answered by scribes, editors, typesetters and publishers all over the world, and the answer is NO! One space after the full stop, not two!
I know. I know. It’s an ingrained habit. I just double tapped the space bar after the full stop three times – and I am in the middle of telling you not to do that! Sorry double spacers, I have been an adamant campaigner for the double space, but it has become apparent that it is now a one-space world. Time to move on.
Back in the day before the world of Microsoft and digital printing, it was always two spaces after the full stop. A rule established during the days of typesetters. Professional typesetters used different kinds of spaces to do things like align tables, set mathematical formulas, and properly align poetry – and when additional space was needed to show the difference between the spacing between words (which was smaller) and the spacing between sentences (which was larger). With the dawn of the typewriter the rule carried over to allow for the chunky and awkward typewriter font - the double space after the full stop allowed for good readability and this is what everybody learnt was the “correct” way.
However, with the advent of computers and HTML this slowly became redundant. Computer fonts automatically give you enough room between sentences with one space.
But Who Says One Space instead of Two?
Typographers, that's who! Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It is one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major writing style guide - including the Modern Language Association Style Manual – agree… a single space after a full stop.
At the end of the day it basically boils down to aesthetics . One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing. (It also requires less work.) In this day and age, a page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
QUICK TIP FOR THOSE WHO USE TWO SPACES: If you are someone who cannot break your two spaces habit, have no fear! Simply write as you always would (with two spaces) and, when you are finished, got to the toolbar of your word processing program, click EDIT > FIND > REPLACE and then choose to replace all double spaces with single spaces. Problem solved!