Young Writers Society

Ever since I began typing, my mom has always instructed me to use two spaces in between each sentence. Therefore, I've always done it naturally and without a second thought. But after looking through several examples where there is only one space after each period, I wonder if what I've been doing is truly appropriate, or if it even matters. Does anyone know? Thank you!

This has a really simple explanation. (And your mom might be some sort of cavewoman)

In the times before computers, as well as writing processors such as Word and OpenOffice, when the main source of writing was the typewriter, there was pretty much only one font option. On the typewriter, all the letters were written with a Monospaced font.

Which meant, that all the letters were all the same size and took up the same amount of space. So skinny letters like i or l both took up as much space as wider letters such as the w or m. To that end, when finishing a sentence they would use two spaces instead of a single one after each period to make it clear.

As the computers started popping up, the need for this disappeared. All writing processors now space the characters out evenly.

Nothing more than that.

Thank you very much, @Birkhoff. Your explanation was very helpful!

For what it's worth, font-spacing is also called "kerning," and anytime a computer shows a "terminal" interface (like the "command prompt" or "shell" or what-have you), that's still always monospaced. I'm probably like the only person on YWS who uses a monospaced text editor for writing stuff at all, but from time to time I do.

Also, when writing code, it's almost always monospaced. That makes it easier to delineate "blocks" of code - and it makes it easier to line up characters, which is valuable for a number of reasons. (Ever tried to line up the letters in two different sentences on Word? even of the same length? it's really hard if you have kerning turned on.)

None of that really has to do with the whole "two spaces" thing, but just spaces in general I guess.

I imagine double spacing after each sentence must be a bother when it comes to editing, but after testing it out it looks really pretty on the page.