Dr. Shades: One or Two Spaces After a Period?

[_EAllusion]

I was taught the two space rule and gave it up long ago. As a vestige of my typing habit, I always type two spaces after a line that ends a paragraph. It's a quirk.

[Jersey Girl]

Seems that most message boards will allocate the same space after a period whether you press the space bar once or twice.

[_MeDotOrg]

Analytics, you wrote:

This lead me to a question which is the topic of the current post and to which I hope you can reply. The inquiry is this: are we permitted to only put a single space after periods like I just did? I ask this because when I was in middle school and learned how to type on a manual typewriter, I was taught to put two spaces after a period. However, I recently learned that current style guides uniformly and emphatically state that periods should be followed by a single period.

In your last sentence, I think you meant to say "that periods should be followed by a single space" not a "single period".

I, too, learned how to type on a manual typewriter. I don't know what you do, but I tend to use the computer keyboard like it's a typewriter and do so automatically as a matter of habit. I'm sure you do as well. I was taught to put ONE space between sentences as you were.

I had forgotten about the 2 space rule until reading this post. Then I flashed on the Underwood typewriter I had in the 9th grade, and remembered that 'two tap' gesture with my thumb.

I had forgotten all about it! When I got my first computer I brushed up on typing using Typing Tutor, an MS-DOS program. No one to tell me about putting 2 spaces after a period, and I just forgot the 'two tap' gesture. Anyway, it was a nostalgia trip down an old neural pathway!

[_Analytics]

I was also taught the two space rule and it's one of the few rules I remember. I thought I had been following this rule and I checked some posts here as well as local documents and it looks like I haven't been. I also looked at an exchange with Analytics and he wasn't following it either.

On the other hand, I checked Sic et Non and it is a consistent two-space blog. I copied text from today into notepad and sure enough, two spaces after every period but not colons. I clicked a random Patheos atheist blog promoted and it was one space.

I heard that one space is "correct" about a year ago. I looked at some old messages of mine from before that, and saw two spaces. Here is where it gets funny thought--when I copied the same message from here to Word so I could count the number of ". "'s, I found out Word automatically deleted the extra spaces. I typically type messages directly into the boxes here, but will sometimes write a longer message in Word first and then copy/paste it over. If I you saw messages older than 12 months with only one period, I would guess some software corrected my space-wasting ways.