Despite what you learned in typing class, stop using two spaces after a period. It’s nothing more than a habit – one worth breaking. ("Curious things, habits,” Agatha Christie wrote in “Witness for the Prosecution.” “People themselves never knew they had them.”)
The practice of double spacing after a period is a holdover from the days when typewriters had “monofaced” type, meaning fonts in which every letter had exactly the same width (in other words, “m” used the same amount of space as “i”). Because of the monoface font, two spaces after a period made it easier to see where one sentence ended and another began.
Today, however, most fonts we typically use are proportionally spaced, meaning that characters take up an amount of space relative to their actual width (the “i” uses less space than the “m”), so that double spacing after periods is not only unnecessary, it mars the look of your text by scattering it with small gaps. Books, magazines, brochures, newspaper, desktop publishing, etc., use only one space after a period, as do both AP style and The Chicago Manual of Style.
Courier is one of the very few fonts occasionally used today that is still monoface.
This is Courier. And, as you can see, its spacing does seem awkward, which renders it not as easy to read as the Lucida Grande font in which the rest of this post appears. The characters all take the same amount of space. That’s why two spaces between sentences made sense when Christie wrote “Witness” in 1933 but does not make sense for us in 2007. Times change. Technology evolves. So should we.
Note: I know there are people and clients who insist on the two-space rule – arguments for doing so include “I’ve always done it that way,” “I’m still totally hot for Miss Shapiro, my 7th grade typing instructor,” and “I want to annoy Dan Santow” – but if for no other reason than it makes text harder to read, and so less advantageous to ourselves and to those our clients are trying to reach, it’s a practice worth stopping.
If for some reason you’re incapable of typing any other way, at least do a search and replace on documents when you’re done. In Word:
- click control/h
- click twice at “find what” and once at “replace with”
- click “replace all”