Jesus christ, who gives a fuck?!

@1 word

Perhaps it was a slow-news day?

Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability.

Well then, fuck them.

And for those of us who don't write professionally, who learned to type before the dawn of computer mainstreamness, when exactly were we supposed to have learned to drop that extra space after the punctuation? Just wondering...

I was taught the two spaces rule, but the one space looks better in print. And look on the bright side: If this is newsworthy, and we are here commenting on it, it means no one set off a bomb or shot a politician today...woot!

In the past few years I've slowly become a one space person. I still use typewriters though and I still like two spaces though. I will never bash people who use two spaces.

You have no problem bitching endlessly about people who use comic sans, but this 1500 word (not actually a lot of words!) essay is "douchey'?

@4 -- I figured it out more than ten years ago.

I had to totally retrain my hands to type just one space after a period, once I learned that this was the accepted correct style, ie Chicago Manual of Style, etc. Then I recently moved to an office where everyone uses two spaces. I've tried pointing out that the stylebooks all agree that one space is correct, and that we follow Chicago for everything unless the Bluebook directs otherwise. And still all of my work comes back looking like someone bled to death on it, correcting my single spaces.

Nine times out of ten, the extra space is lost into the ether of HTML anyway.  Which is too bad, since I prefer the two-space look.  Ahhhh, look at those beautiful wide-open spaces.  Gots me some elbow room there.

I think it looks stupid even in fixed-width fonts.

@7 whenever I see things about comic sans I think of this http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologu…

The best part about this is how your headline didn't work because HTML ignores regular double spaces.

protip: for ". ? or .  ?" try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breakin…

I have never heard of this. I was taught to type with two spaces in typing class as the proper way to type.

Evidently it's a grievous error according to pampered anal retentives that have never had anything actually serious happen to them in their entire lives that would have taught them to have appropriate emotional responses to minutia.

Or they could be editors trying to save print space in a publication. In that case it makes perfect sense.

Two spaces? What about two sheds???!!!

Thank you @#4. I just learned of this "error" about 6 months ago. Now I have 25 years of ingrained muscle memory to try to unlearn. Crap!

This can all be made relevant by adding up the extra calories expended in the U.S. every year by typing two spaces instead of one, converting it to kilowatt-hours, and figuring out how many extra medium lattes could have been made on a typical espresso machine.

13 FTW

I couldn't figure out what this was about.

@7

Comic Sans is a really band font that is borderline unreadable, is over used, and is put in to use in inappropriate circumstances (ie funeral home programs).

Double spacing after a period is a marginally noticeable minor quibble that is incredibly popular to complain about on the internet because unemployed graphic designers need something to fill their blogs with. It's a cavalcade of douchebags clamouring to see who can be more anal-retentive about type-setting.

Geez. This has been popping up for a couple years. Can not both exist? Similar to limeys spelling words differently (e.g. colour, flavour) both should be allowed.

I was taught that two-spacing was proper. And I'll continue to do it because it definitely looks better.

I was taught 2 spaces, and I will continue to do so, because I'm very old and set in my ways.

Also, it probably doesn't really matter to most people. As long as you can read what I'm writing, we're fine.

This author should learn to code in C or perl. He would live the rest of his days in absolute bliss, posting annoying diatribes on indentation and white space.

@21: "Borderline unreadable?" Really?

Two spaces after periods, capitalize the first letter at the beginning of a sentence, write actual words like "you" instead of "u" and for fuck's sake, act like educated humans.
Jeezus.

People who go on and on about comic sans are probably the very same people who were all het up when the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was cleaned and Michelangelo's intended colors sprang forth in all their bright glory----"He couldn't POSSIBLY have wanted such lurid hues," said they! They probably also deny the fact that Roman statues were painted, and not subtly.

When I was taught typing in elementary school, my teacher used the two space rule but I ignored her. I've always been a one space girl.

Since HTML rendering ignores double-spaces (as evidenced by the heading of this post), he couldn't even see the original spacing if he read email as HTML, as most of us have done for the last 10 years.

It's also amusing that he can get in such a smug elitist tizzy over this issue when the actual relevent elite, namely typographers, do put additional space between sentences. TeX, for example, tries to put about 1.5x as much space between sentences as it does between words.

I posted this and Facebook and people went insane. Between this and the "your horoscope isn't your horoscope, oh wait it still is" news, I think there were just a few too many shocks to everyone's tried and true beliefs last week.

I am amazed at how out-of-control the defense of 'two spaces' become. Technology changes society. Move on or not, but don't ask the rest of us to stay behind.

@30: Which is why people don't need to TYPE them anymore. Manually entering two is no longer necessary (and theoretically depending on context or program) will either create extra space or no additional space at all.

Poor typesetters. :(

(In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.)

Hello, irony. If you're competent to write a tech advice column, then replacing every instance of double spacing with a single space takes you approximately three seconds. I'd wager he spent more time writing this column than he has "correcting" this "error."

I was taught to use a single space. In college I wrote for a European audience that insisted on two spaces, so I changed to that format. Around 1999 I stopped the two space thing because the HTML standard calls for browsers to represent all whitespace as a single space (the myriad ways they don't comply is another topic altogether, but they all comply when it comes to compressing two spaces into one). I don't think it's particularly important one way or the other.

I hope you lose sleep at night over this.

Prozac, typographers. Prozac.

The anti-two space movement is not new. Ever since kerned fonts became widely available on word processors (ie, 99% of what you've looked at on a computer for the past 20 years) the double space has been obsolete.

I repeat what anti-double spacers say everyhwere:
The double space rule came into being because typewriter type was not kerned.
Everything you read now is kerned. End of story. Double space not needed.

Maybe take the opportunity to drop one key stroke per period as a way to combat incipient repetitive stress symptoms.

Onion, I think you mean "proportional spacing." Kerning is something completely different.

i wasn't taught anything..i'm a size queen and my spacing seems to prove this ( although my persistent lack of capitals hint an exception ). tight is overrated and longer is better than fatter.

I definitely was taught to use the double space in my high school typing class; I graduated in '03. But I never employed its use in real life.

Judgementalist @32: Let me get this straight. Even though the double-space doesn't affect the rendered output, you think it is justifiable to write an ariticle in a national publication complaining about the people who do it in their source? Are you going to view HTML to see whether I did it when I wrote this comment? Your chosen handle is well-deserved.

@1

I do!

I think this is a totally appropriate essay topic. Seriously. Two-spacing leads to unsightly rivers, people! Stop making the world uglier!

I stopped using two spaces after each period when I realized that I loathed my typing instructor. I was willing to accept the grade hit against each assignment if it meant I might possibly drive her to a stroke. Yeah, that's how much I hated her.

I think people complain when they hear they are supposed to use one space, because they don't understand what typographers and graphic designers do. It is incredibly annoying to get a bunch of text with two spaces. Even if you can auto-correct for the most part, it adds to the heap of things that must be dealt with in typography and design. Seriously, people don't appreciate the work of graphic designers and especially typographers.

@40: Ack. Such rage. Personally, I think doublespacing is a waste of time, but I don't care what you do in your personal life -- it's just a frustration in my current academic context when faculty or group members comment/grade based on "the rule of two spaces."

Hell, triple space for all I care. HTML (generally) saves my eyes from such obscenities.

At work, I correct each and every double space as that's our standard and I've sworn to enforce it. In my personal life, I type with double spaces, and I'm convinced that it's better. Many times at work I get requests from clients to put double spaces in because the single space fucks up a particular sentence, above all where one sentence ends with an initialism and begins with a proper noun. The single space makes the reader initially think that the two sentences are just one. It's really annoying, and it sucks that clarity has to be sacrificed on the altar of pretty.

B F D !

This is the first I've heard of it and I will not change. I don't think this has anything to do with technology, just a knee-jerk para-politically correct way of changing shit up every fifteen minutes. Like going from "VD" to "STD" to "STI", or from "GLBT" to "LGBT". Really, what's your point?
Fuck all you term-changers. I like my Asians oriental, my gays homosexual, and my coffee black, like my men.

37 well yeah, you are a bigger geek than me. yes, it is BOTH the varying widths of the letters in a proportional font AND the kerning that often go along with them that make the double space obsolete.
if a proportional font weren't kerned well it would look stupid. and if a monospaced font were kerned it still wouldn't look right. so we are both right. right.

What bugs me about the Slate rant is his annoyance with having to remove the spaces from other people's writing. Removing the spaces is as simple as calling your word editor's replace function and replacing all double spaces with single spaces. 5 seconds.

You can have my extra space when your html parser takes from my cold, dead input device.

For work, I use APA style, which in the 5th edition recommended one space. I switched to one space- it seemed to make sense given the differences between computers and typewriters. Now the 6th edition APA Pub Manual comes out and recommends two spaces in manuscript drafts. So now I try to use two, but I thought it was odd that they went back to two spaces. To all the one-spacers: I agree with you but APA doesn't, so now I'm supposed to keep track of how many spaces I use depending on the context in which I'm writing. WTF!

One of the strangest things about this whole how-much-spacing-after-periods-to-use business is that many old books use double- and even triple-spaces. Apparently there was not a consensus about single spaces back in the day. For example, Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain, Second Edition (1943) uses a space after periods that is about 2-2.5 times the width of a regular space. This may be because the text is justified.

Some other typographic oddities about the book:

* Tables are numbered with Roman numerals.
* Section headings are on the same line as the section text, separated by a period followed by an em dash; e.g. Longitudinal Buckling.—
* The em dash is the same width as the after-period space.
* The % symbol is not used but instead it is written as per cent

I use 2 spaces, an old English teacher made it mandatory, only to say by the end of the year that it didn't matter. I've done it pretty much ever since, and this is the first time in my adult life I've ever seen someone give a fuck. Can't say I give anywhere near as much of a fuck as this article, and I will probably continue my double space game, because my hero Assange does it.

@30: Two  spaces in HTML.  One can even bind a macro that enters    to one of the useless Windows keys just for ending sentences with two spaces in a way that browsers will properly render.  Does it look odd to see two-spaced endings like this?  Does it look better?  Worse?  Neither? (And if that's the case, should we really care which people use?)

Interestingly, I was also taught to use two spaces (although I've since converted) in the nineties, after computers had advanced beyond monotype displays.  I always thought of the extra space as something that gave the reader a little chance to breathe before delving into the next sentence.  Given that there's no central authority on proper English speech nor writing conventions, knock yourselves out and do whatever.  I think a certain degree of prescriptivism in language is important in order to maintain intelligibility (or at least prescriptivism with respect to what counts as e.g. "American English"; to say not that something is more or less correct but that it either is or is not a convention of American English), but something like terminal spacing is completely irrelevant outside of any specific, given context.  If your editor cares, do it that way.  If not, go wild.

By the way, @Paul: you might want to change the title to use non-breaking spaces ( ) so the difference is actually clear, as #30 is quite correct in stating that most browsers will not render more than one space in a row.

Somebody better tell my English teachers. Elementary, Jr. High, High school, from 1988-2000 I was taught 2 spaces. It was even in the student handbook's short writing/grammar section. No one ever corrected me in college.

Oh good God. I am a professional editor and let me tell you: TWO SPACES IS NOT INCORRECT ENGLISH. IT IS JUST OLD-FASHIONED. I write with two spaces in my personal writing, but at work I whichever spacing policy the clients prefer--advising them, of course, that one space is more modern.

I just wish they'd stop using proportional fonts and right-justify in the e-books I check out from the library. It reads very weirdly on my Android screen when there are three words in a line with huge white gaps between them.