When Did the Spaces-Between-Sentences Rule Change?

I found out from my fellow editors at the Prairie Light Review that I am old. Now, it’s not hard to tell when you see us sitting together, discussing a story or a photograph. I’m me and they’re 20-something. But if we were online-only like back during the bleak days of Covid, and just using an icon without a camera, they would still know.

And this is how they know: I type two spaces between sentences.

It’s not that I take longer to text because I use proper spelling and grammar, it’s not because I don’t say everything is “low-key” nor promise “not gonna lie” at the end or beginning of every sentence, it’s because of the typing rule I learned back in the 1980s, and that goes back for a hundred years before that.

Hit the space bar twice after end punctuation before starting a new sentence. It is for reading clarity. Why wouldn’t these kids, or anyone else, want clarity?

When I asked another adult about it, she told me, “Yeah, Dave. Ever since word processing took over, one space is the rule.” I had to go look it up.

Okay. So, typewriters from the late 1800s up through the 1980s used type keys that were the same size. That is, the key that struck a capital W on my paper was the same size and width as the period, so each letter, number, or symbol was given the same amount of space on a line of print. And this same circumstance goes back even further for manually setting the type for newspapers.

With the advent of word processing and ink jet and laser printers (we won’t discuss the daisy wheel), there was no longer a need for any sized key to strike an ink ribbon and piece of paper. Text was free to put a lowercase letter i closer to the letter before it, and the next letter could be closer in, too. Five-letter words only needed to be as long as they needed to be, not as long as every other five-letter word.

Now, I’m not ancient, and this makes perfect sense. As a writer, I welcomed the use of different fonts (except for Comic Sans) and sizes and never having to change out a ribbon or unstick a key, but I never gave a second thought to not tapping the space bar twice after my end punctuation. (In fact, for this blog entry, I've made sure to double-space just so you can see.)

When our journal was in copyediting, an editor asked me why my story had so many extra spaces. I replied, “So you can read it clearly and distinguish the ends of sentences. That’s been the rule since I learned keyboarding.”

She replied, “Well, I guess… But that’s not the rule, now.”

And she was right. Even the Chicago Manual of Style, the APA, and MLA all changed to recommending a single space between sentences since the advent of digital print.

What's more, now I'm starting to notice when others add the extra space. I think it still reads better, but it also gives me an insight into the age of an author for good or bad.

So, I’m old. But at least I know how to use Search and Replace and can have my program identify all the double-spaces I made and replace them with just a single space.

The kid on my right was going through and deleting all the extra spaces in my story one by one.

Heh-heh-heh….

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