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How many spaces after a period? One or two?

By Ron Creel

The question of how many spaces one should place after a period when typing is a question as hotly debated as whether a roll of toilet paper should unroll from the front or the back.

Let me begin by saying that my mother was a college-level typing instructor back in the day when the use of business machines was taught in community colleges to those who were destined to work in office steno and typing pools. So I grew up learning the finer skills of how to properly load a typewriter with two sheets of paper, including carbon paper if a copy was to be made, and the proper typing techniques. But, oh, how I have rebelled after all these years.

As an editor of other writers’ work, I have seen both single and double space after the period, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out if it’s a matter of education, age, gender, geography or just not really caring one way or another. But it does pretty much cuts down the line. My own background was to go with the double space or suffer the wrath of my mother, but then going through journalism school in the 1970s, I was taught the single space standard. There’s nothing like a journalism professor and then a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, cursing newsroom copy editor screaming at you every time you did something wrong to get you with the program. So the single space stuck.

So enough of the personal background. So what’s the (modern) reasoning for using the single space, you ask? It basically comes down to progressing from typewriter-produced monospaced font to computers, which use word processing programs that can handle and adjust the spacing between the period and the beginning of the next sentence. As for established styles, Modern Language Association (MLA) goes with the single space as a preference, but leaves the door open to say that there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after ending punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor states a preference one way or another. In this case, it’s best to consider the directions of the person assigning the grade or signing the paycheck. Wikipedia even chimes in with a little information:

The two spaces convention was brought out by the use of monospaced font on typewriters, and carried on solely by tradition. Most fonts used in word processors since the mid-1990’s have the correct spacing already adjusted, rendering the traditional double space after a full stop (period) obsolete.

And there was a LinkedIn discussion posted last year about the topic. Oh, as I said, everyone has an opinion, and this was no exception.

So this is where I stand. If it’s a document I will be managing and someone else has created the document using two spaces, I will change it. However, if I’m editing someone else’s document that I will not manage, I won’t touch the spaces and won’t even mention it. And back in the day when I was grading high school papers, I focused on content, grammar and mechanics. My students really didn’t need to worry about the spacing issue.

My preference? I like one space after the period sort of like the way I prefer the roll of toilet paper to unroll from the back.

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