Whatcha gonna do, 1 space or 2?
How many spaces after a period, one or two?
I’ve been asked to referee disputes on the subject, been urged to publicize the “right” answer, and been chastised for recommending the “wrong” answer. Lawyers tend to feel strongly about spaces, so I hesitate to weigh in. Let me start by acknowledging there are arguments on both sides.
If you put two spaces after periods, you have several arguments on your side. There’s the long tradition: that’s the way we’ve always done it (at least since the invention of the typewriter). You also have your own training to back you up: that’s the way we were taught (and still are, as I learned when my seventh grader took typing last year, or what is now called “keyboarding”). You might rely on widespread practice: that’s what everyone does (or at least the lawyers you know). Or you might say one space looks bad: it makes the document seem crowded.
If you put one space after periods, you have arguments on your side, too. One space is what the pros do: professionally published texts, like books, magazines, and newspapers mostly use one space after periods. For example, Austin Lawyer uses one space. You could point out that two-space practice is a vestige of the typewriter, with its mono-spaced fonts, and no one uses typewriters or mono-spaced fonts like Courier anymore (at least they shouldn’t). Or you might argue that one space is becoming the modern, standard practice (which it is, although it isn’t catching on quickly in law practice).
With arguments on both sides, I’ve found it difficult to persuade anyone on this issue. I tell my students that while in law school, choose a preference and be consistent with it. Then, in practice, conform to the expectations of your employer.
My own preference? I’m a one-space guy, and here’s why.
First, two-space practice really is a vestige of the typewriter, and I want my word-processed documents to look neat, modern, and professional. I don’t find a one-space document crowded; rather, I find a two-space document “gappy.” What are all those little cavities of white space?
Second, one-space practice really is the trend for professional writing. Search the topic on the Web if you doubt it. It’s just that lawyers are behind. The truth is that in professional writing, we are in the middle of a long, slow transition from two spaces to one space, and it really isn’t worth fighting it.
Third, those who know—the experts—prefer one space:
“One space is the custom of professional typographers and consensus view of typography authorities.” Matthew Butterick, Typography for Lawyers 42 (2010).
“Like most publishers, Chicago advises leaving a single character space, not two spaces, between sentences . . . .” Chicago Manual of Style 60 (15th ed. 2010).
“[T]he single space between sentences is enough to visually separate them, and two spaces creates a disturbing gap. . . . Yes, this is a difficult habit to break, but it must be done.” Robin Williams, The PC Is Not a Typewriter 13–14 (1992).
Fourth, clean-up is easy. As you know, there are plenty of places in abbreviations and citations where you want one space after a period, not two. Making sure you have one space there but two spaces after sentences is a headache, isn’t it? I use one space after sentences, so here’s all I need to do: as part of a final edit, run a search for two spaces and replace them with one. Done.
It’s still too early say two spaces is wrong for law practice since it’s so common in legal writing. But the battle for two spaces is being lost—one space at a time.
Filed under: Grammar and Punctuation
Those reasons are fairly trivial, which is why writers are reluctant to change their practices. But there’s a much more important reason that one space is better: it is more cognitively fluent—which is to say, it is read more efficiently and probably with greater comprehension and retention. Social-psychological research on cognitive fluency has demonstrated that small changes in appearance can have dramatic consequences for readability and comprehension. (http://tinyurl.com/3e9fqcs) Two spaces disrupts the normal reading process. (http://tinyurl.com/89lc5hm)
Do these studies of “cognitive fluency” and the like actually study legal prose? The problem I have with those studies, and with analogies to magazine and book publishing, is that none of that prose physically resembles legal prose in its most distinctive feature: inline citations.
In most prose, the reader’s eyes stay glued to the page from the end of one sentence to the next. In legal prose, if the reader sees those italics beginning the next sentence, the eyes start to skip and scan and look for a nice place to land. That’s when a double-space-wide “gappy” landing pad is very inviting.
The erratic gaps caused by full justification annoy me. Consistent gaps between sentences do not annoy me.
Wayne: Your reason #4 in favor of single spacing is why I sometimes use it. It’s much easier to find-and-replace to get rid of double spaces than to verify that double spacing is correct. When proofreading time is limited, that is a virtue.
It also touches on what I think is the real reason behind the resurgence of the single-space rule: It’s not about what’s easier for humans to read. It’s about what’s easier for computers (and our software tools) to write.
For example, the HTML format behind web pages crunches down any arbitrary amount of white space to a single space (unless your tool inserts special symbols, such as the HTML entity for a non-breaking space). Without that clue, a computer will often guess wrong about when a pattern with a period-space-capital is a sentence break or not. So the software usually doesn’t even try.
Before HTML, technical writers were quite picky about sentence spacing. Donald Knuth, the computer-science professor who spent ten years on the TeX typesetting system, used a concept of an inter-sentence space slightly longer than one and less than two spaces. But even his system would often guess wrong. So the TeX format asks writers to manually note each time that they did *not* want this behavior (like in a set of abbreviations that appear mid-sentence).
That’s more work than most of us are willing to do.
Another problem with the two-space approach is that it creates extra opportunities to go wrong, some of which will survive proofreading. It’s easier to stay consistent with the one-space approach.
Wayne,
I completely agree with everything that you’ve said to justify one space, not two. But as I pointed out to Matt Butterick, if you follow the convention of the famous TeX typsetting program (almost the de facto standard for scientific and technical articles) written by computer genius Donald Knuth, it automatically adds one-and-a-half spaces between sentences. I kind of like that.
Chris
To follow up on Stephen Diamond’s response, a two-space period makes worse the already abysmal job that Microsoft Word does auto-spacing justified text.