<p>My college son had several friends over tonight. My younger son, who isn’t on summer break yet, was typing a paper. One of the college kids told my son that his roommate put two spaces after periods to make his papers appear longer. What??? I told the kids that you’re always supposed to double space after periods. It turned out that half of the group did, but they said the spacing question had come up before with other friends. I did an Internet search, and to my surprise, it seems the single space is the preferred spacing in most of the articles I found. </p>
<p>When I was very young in elementary school the teaching was somewhat split on this issue, but the official word in the end was that a single space at the end of a sentence is customary today. You’ll notice documents by some adults or older people or older books have the two spaces at the ends of sentences.</p>
<p>I actually just had older people at first, but I realized my mom used to (?) do it, so I added “adults” in. I’m actually not sure when the switch was made, but since it was an issue in my childhood, I figure it was only perhaps 15 years ago. Many adults who need to type in their jobs, though, have since switched to the single space, so I figured it was probably seen more often in older adults who may not use technology regularly in their jobs or are retired.</p>
<p>Considering that a normal paragraph has perhaps five to ten sentences and that you could probably fit a hundred or more space characters per line, the probability that adding an extra space after each sentence would add an extra line to the end of a given paragraph is rather small. I would guess that it would not add more than one extra line every few pages, and that the OP’s son’s friend’s roommate’s use of extra spaces is not going to be very effective in making papers look longer.</p>
<p>I was very carefully instructed in typing class (back when manual typewriters were the norm) to place two spaces between sentences, and remember having had points deducted when that practice was not followed. To this day, I automatically tap the space bar twice with the thumb of the hand that will start the next sentence while the pinky on the opposite hand is headed for the shift key. I guess I am going to have to get with the new program.</p>
<p>By the way, I purposefully typed this post with two spaces after each sentence and they got automatically collapsed into one by the software. I have a job that is very highly technically oriented and still tend to double space after a period. Old habits die hard.</p>
<p>I double space after periods. I recognize that many young people – including my children – don’t. I think they are wrong, although based on the OP’s quote maybe I should reconsider that.</p>
<p>When I type papers for classes I always single space, mostly because I don’t really write linearly and it seems somewhat obsessive trying to keep track of where all the spaces go, so I don’t.</p>
<p>However, now that most of the papers I type are math papers, I use latex, and latex automatically adds the extra space unless you tell it not to. So my papers do have the extra space, but not because I mean to.</p>
<p>FWIW, I don’t think it makes much difference.</p>
<p>On the Internet, in HTML, you’re in trouble if you want to add spaces. For instance, I just put about 50 spaces between the last sentence and this one. But it parses to just one space in HTML. My habit is to add two spaces. Different publications have different expectations. Some ding me and ask me to resubmit with one space after sentences, but that’s easy enough to CTRL+H and replace all double spaces with a single space.</p>
<p>There are about 100 spaces between these asterisks: * *</p>
<p>Tell your son if he really wants to add some length to his paper to use the replace with function to replace all the periods in his paper with 14 or 16 point verdana font periods. It will easily add quite a bit of length, and teachers never notice!</p>
<p>That’s so funny you said that sarah_mc. That same boy who said to add the double space also said that he uses a bigger font for periods. I thought he was joking, but I guess he wasn’t. </p>
<p>I never noticed until now that my double spaces were being reduced to single spaces D’yer Maker. Although, like some of the other have said, I don’t think I’d ever get out of the habit of double spacing.</p>
<p>You’ll notice that Microsoft Word grammar sees double spaces between sentences as incorrect, so they must have made that decision at some point.</p>
<p>Two spaces after the period is old news. That is not the standard in publishing any longer. It was an old rule used in typewriting (I was also trained to do that in typing class) and typesetting as well. The two spaces went out around 1990. </p>
<p>We had a big brouhaha about this issue at the publishing company where I worked in that era. The president of the company was a former English teacher and he was horrified that we went to the more modern one space rule.</p>
<p>That’s kind of odd, that it went out in 1990. I remember being taught when I was learning writing (born in 1985) to use 2 spaces. I never noticed the rule fading out, but by the time I was typing papers (even though I had computer classes all the way back in second grade) it was just a single space.</p>
<p>Doesn’t even occur to me that two spaces would be appropriate. It looks very bizarre.</p>
<p>Just learned the new rule here; thanks to all who explained things, such as how the spaces disappear in the posts. The pace is faster, no pause between thoughts (sentences), just keep on going… That’s what happens when you don’t deal in the writing/publishing world and child never let you see his work for many years…</p>
<p>@ wis75: If you want to add multiple spaces between sentences here on CC, there is a way…Unfortunately, it requires a bit of effort…And lots of extra typing or a macro you insert…For me – and for most people – I think it’s more a matter of long-standing habit that’s too hard to break…It would be much easier for me to learn to use a single space that to keep doing this annoying macro…Besides, do you think it actually looks better?..At best, I don’t think the appearance even matters.</p>
<p>@ wis75: If you want to add multiple spaces between sentences here on CC, there is a way. Unfortunately, it requires a bit of effort. And lots of extra typing or a macro you insert. For me – and for most people – I think it’s more a matter of long-standing habit that’s too hard to break. It would be much easier for me to learn to use a single space that to keep doing this annoying macro. Besides, do you think it actually looks better? At best, I don’t think the appearance even matters.</p>
<p>For double spaces in the first iteration of this message, I inserted the following: [noparse]…[/noparse]</p>
<p>Yes, I’d say that I fall into that category too. The funny thing is, that all the kids who were here last night were taught keyboarding in the mid '90s, and some follow the double space rule while others don’t. None of them remember being taught one way or the other though. I guess the grueling typing drills and papers covered with bright red slashes are a thing of the past. That, you don’t forget (lol).</p>
<p>Thanks for posting those paragraph examples D’yer! It’s really interesting to see the difference in the posts. I don’t think I’ll go to that length to double space though. I’m lucky that I figured out how to do the quote box on CC. ;)</p>
<p>I write and edit scientific publications for a living. One space between sentences is now the standard. Word processing and typesetting programs are designed so that one space after a period gives the correct appearance. Two spaces after periods went out with the typewriter.</p>