Home Blog One space or two after a full stop? So, given this general consensus, is using two spaces after a full stop actually incorrect? Author: Jacob Funnell. Read more Popular topics Advice and tips Grammar Choose your words wisely Plain English Email Language abuse Bids and tenders Report writing Uncategorised Psychology and linguistics Reader-centred writing Online and social media Technology Punctuation Podcast Technical writing Spellings Presentations and speeches News from Emphasis Jargon International issues Customer relations Letters and CVs Numbers and finance 9.
Design and formatting 9. Courses for companies 8. Proofreading 8. Graduates 7. Videos 7. In contrast, word processing software uses proportionally spaced fonts, which automatically adjust the spacing between characters to accommodate the varying width of letters.
This is called proportional typesetting. Now here is the same sentence using a proportional font from word processing software:. Because there is so much extra spacing in the typewritten monospace font, writers using typewriters needed the extra space after punctuation to indicate a full stop, such as a period, question mark, or exclamation point.
All of these tools will space letters and sentences appropriately for you if you use one space after the sentence. Using two spaces will actually distort your typeset. Word processing has been around for a long time and we should update our writing to reflect current tools. The lesson to business writers is that two spaces date-stamps our writing. Extra space between sentences creates a river of white in marketing documents, diminishing the impact.
Dianna Huff, a respected and experienced manufacturing marketing writer recently affirmed this on Twitter:. Source: Dianna Huff and Robyn Bradley. Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. The Associated Press Stylebook, which is the most accepted style guide for business writing. The Gregg Reference Manual. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association APA was the only style guide that overtly recommended two spaces after a period, and even that long-time holdout for two spaces changed its guideline to one space in its update.
The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period a full stop for you Brits as an error, and to offer a correction to one space.
Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app.
The Editor feature in Word allows users to ignore the suggestion once, make the change to one space, or turn off the writing-style suggestion. We understand Microsoft has been testing the feature change recently and it will roll out to everyone using the desktop version of Word soon.
Feedback to the change has been overwhelmingly positive. Much of the debate around one space or two has been fueled by the halcyon days of the typewriter. Typewriters used monospaced fonts to allocate the same amount of horizontal spacing to every character. Word and many other similar apps make fonts proportional, so two spaces is no longer necessary. Expect to see the new changes in Word roll out to everyone in the coming months. Congratulations, fellow one-spacers. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week.
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