When did the tradition of double spacing between sentences fall from favor?

It’s not technically right or wrong; it’s simply a style which some people and publications follow and some don’t. A publication I once worked for used it for years and then dropped it. Social media and Internet writing has changed many old grammatical rules—in my opinion as a writer, some for the better and some for the worse.

As I recall (perhaps incorrectly), the double space became standard when compositors were setting type from manually typewritten manuscripts. The double space was meant to help emphasize the end of a sentence.

Because I worked under that system for decades, I still double-space after terminal punctuation, and my eye expects sentence spacing rather than word spacing there. The proportions look wrong to me otherwise. But when software came along that could override that, it began to disappear.

My recollection, again perhaps faulty, is that newspapers—also typeset—abbreviate(d) the spacing just to fit more characters per line and ultimately save space.

Another holdover from those days is the underscore, which was an instruction to the typesetter: “Set this in italics.” Typewriters had no italic characters, but typesetters did. On a typewriter, it involved the use of a separate key; you went back over the word you had typed and added the underscore character. There was no such thing as underscore plus italics; underscore was italics.

@Jeruba is THE WORD when it comes to this kind of stuff.

I still like the double space, @Pachy.

I, too, learned to type on a manual typewriter, @Jeruba. And I started wanting to be a journalist in junior high middle school. Mimeograph, of course.
I still see holdovers of the underscore/italics today. Especially regarding titles. I hadn’t even remembered where it came from until you mentioned it.

I still use double-space in terminal punctuation in Word and other long text documents for a practical reason: I can search on the combination of two spaces. Word will highlight the combined spaces, and I can see at a glance (before a final proofreading, for example) where my long sentences are and what might need some final rewrite before the once-through with spell checking, grammar checking and re-reading.

Here is the sine qua non, the absolute last word, on why you should be using one space not two at the end of a sentence.

Actually, @Jeruba, it is typesetters who insist on it. The manual typewriter’s design flaws were the culprit for two-spaces after periods, but they are no more!

Thank goodness.

^^ Great article

I still double space, by habit. I also like the way it looks. I’ll go to my grave being a double-spacer.

@marinelife, I don’t see what correction you are making with “Actually.” It seems to me that the article says just what I said: that typesetters wanted to see two spaces in manually typewritten manuscripts from which they were setting type for printing. Quoting: “Monospaced type gives you text that looks ‘loose’ and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read.” Typesetters wanted original manuscripts to be easier for them to read so they could set them correctly.

This didn’t mean that they were going to set it that way, only that they wanted that extra visual aid in the source document. Only the typesetter (and editors and other production people) was going to see that.

In fact, I believe that magazine editors also used to require two spaces in manuscripts submitted for consideration, and (again if I recall correctly) failing to do so was enough to get your ms. pitched into the reject pile. Not now, of course, since electronic documents have completely changed the nature of submissions.

If no distinction is being made between book typography and what an author hands in, and these days there may not be any, that doesn’t change the fact that it came about when those were two separate operations. And so typing teachers taught all students to follow the two-space convention, presumably because one or two of them somewhere were going to be handing a manuscript in for publication.

I never thought that a typewriter’s monospacing was considered a design flaw; rather, it was just a limitation of the technology available to that point. Isn’t that so?

When typing on iPhone (not sure whether it’s the same for ipad as well) double spacing at the end of your sentence automatically adds the period at the end.

It’s a bit frustrating to me that this doesn’t happen when using an Android device because it’s a hard habit to drop, especially if one learned to type on a manual typewriter originally.

I’ll be a double spacer until the day I shuffle off this mortal coil. I don’t see anything wrong with double spacing this way (even tho it no longer serves the same purpose as it did in the old days.)

I’m glad that Apple kept this and added in the bonus of providing the period for you. It definitely saves time since you don’t have to go through separate motions to change fields in order to access punctuation. I think it was quite intelligent of them to do it as they did.

The other thing it does after adding the period is that it automatically activates the caps key for the next letter you type to begin the next sentence. It is so efficient.

I think it’s absolute genius that they did it that way.

I join with @Buttonstc in not seeing anything wrong with typing with double space.

Double spacing after a period looks normal to me. When typing on my Apple products it usually looks like I use a single space, because I often don’t insert a period by typing it out, because I need to switch to the screen with the period, I double space when I am done with a sentence and my phone or iPad automatically inserts the period. This automation results in a singles space. When I type without this feature I still double space.

At first I thought the OP was talking about space between lines, which was easier to read when we hand wrote documents, or easier to correct if someone was editing something for us by hand.

@Buttonstc My auto capitalize comes on one or two spaces after a period.

If you double space for the auto insert of the period it’s only a single space after the period probably. You can backspace to test it out. See how many spaces are actually there.

OK, let’s test this out.

Oh, that’s interesting. Sure enough, it ends up being only a single space even though I’m hitting the space bar twice.

So one of the spaces is taken up by the period. Interesting.

Does it work this way on your ipad as well as on the iPhone?

I’m assuming that it most likely does since many people have both devices and would likely object if there were inconsistency.

But since I’ve always had an iPhone but an Android tablet, this irks me constantly to the point where if I’m writing responses of more than a sentence or two, I’ll switch to my iPhone even tho it’s so much smaller a keyboard and device. Typing on a tablet is an exercise in frustration for me.

I wish that Android included an option to have the keyboard act like an Apple keyboard. That would be a terrific feature for them to have.

Oh well, I can dream :)

I have a Samsung. Will test it out later.

Here’s an interesting article on the subject, in spite of its obsolescence. “Spaced Out (Section 8) is all about spaces in early digital typing and typesetting.

Interestingly, Google’s voice-to-text feature will automatically use a single space after all punctuation.

@jca On Apple we need to change the settings to autocapitalize. It’s in the same place as autocorrect for spelling.

I actually studied typography, and work with it daily in my career.

Double spacing after a period was put into action becuase typesets of the time had equal spacing for each letter. Meaning, the letter “I” took up as much space as the letter “M” and they were always center aligned to the allotted space. Without a double space, your eyes would have to rely on a small dot in order to tell if the sentence had ended. The extra space allowed for a visual break in the text, making it much easier to notice.

Since the digital revolution, the extra space is mostly unnecessarily. Modern typesets account for the spacing for each letter independently, and can be further altered in realtime by the software used to type. A period mark now extra spacing built into the font to create the visual break in a line of text.

However, Unicode fonts with equal letter spacing still exist in the digital world and an extra space is still needed to create the visual break. These are typically reserved for software without text formatting. (Computer terminals, code printing, etc).