Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks unless otherwise prompted by your instructor. Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides. Indent the first line of each paragraph one half-inch from the left margin. Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin.
Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines. Use italics throughout your essay to indicate the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, provide emphasis. If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page.
Entitle the section Notes centered, unformatted. Formatting the First Page of Your Paper Do not make a title page for your paper unless specifically requested or the paper is assigned as a group project. In the case of a group project, list all names of the contributors, giving each name its own line in the header, followed by the remaining MLA header requirements as described below. Format the reaminder of the page as requested by the instructor. In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date.
Again, be sure to use double-spaced text. Double space again and center the title. AT 30, page views for this article and counting, the passion with which the writing community loves to debate the matter of sentence spacing and the religious zealousness with which the proponents of its various mythologies adhere to their stories is astounding.
By the same reasoning one could start sentences with upper or lowercase letters depending on the level of emphasis desired; the period indicates the end of the previous sentence so the capitals are arguably unnecessary. Herbert Bayer of the Bauhaus school advocated for the abandonment of capital letters back in the s, but though logical and efficient, his movement never got any traction. The emspace simulated by a double space was correct up until the standard changed fairly abruptly in the early 60s.
Now we live in a single-spaced world. When in doubt, consult the style manual. Thank you so much for an interesting explanation. I am very doubtful of my ability to change after so many years of typing, but I will at least stop judging the one-spacers.
How easily one can change would also have to do with how many sentences one has typed. I wonder if this is why my font of choice is Courier! Maybe my two-space style looks better in that font. Good observation, though I personally adopted the single-space standard a long time ago, anyway.
I prefer two spaces after a period because I believe in the theory that the eye subconsciously picks up on the larger space — not so much the period itself — thereby allowing the reader to grasp more quickly and accurately the structure of the sentence, and paragraph for that matter. I agree, also, that the aesthetics are better than using a single space following periods and colons. You are right about the eye. As a result, I tend not to continue reading. I do appreciate your balanced treatment of the two-space versus one-space debate.
As you say, typographic conventions, like spelling and usage, evolve. Whether one likes it or not, we are now in a one-space era. Great post.
Beautiful examples. Thanks for the clarity. I learned to use one space, my husband learned to use two. The battle rages. Thank you for confirming I am not crazy. I am 34 years old and I speificly remember the double space after punctuation. I have recently returned to college and have found classmates as well as consulting editors have removed my double space. They identify it as a typo. Was it common place 20 yeas ago? If not, I wonder where I picked it up? I swear I learned it in school.
It was taught in school, but the convention was quickly abandoned by most of us who are also familiar with standard typesetting especially in books. I learned it and never used it because it made me look like I was still writing a paper for my teacher instead of a professional product. I was born in When I got to high school we were beginning computer integration pretty well but still taught some typewriter keyboarding. We discussed the whys of the font formatting and computer capability.
I am just 30 and was also taught double space in school. In official court documents, double is still used from what I can tell, and no matter how hard I have tried to employ the single space method, double is ingrained in me and my writing will invariably transition from single to double at some point. I have never had any professors criticize it, but I am now aware in group projects or editing assignments to note whether or not the writer uses double or single.
I like my doubles; otherwise everything seems to run together for me. In a publishing situation, your typesetter will convert all double spaces to singles. On the web, the browser will do the same thing. I just found your article.
Nice to see another person picking up on a little bit of reality. I have a blog dedicated to this subject that I update when I get the chance though sadly not lately. But at the moment I suspect that the real ultimate killer of the wider sentence spacing was the teletypesetting systems that were used as a front-end to the Linotype in the fifties to make typesetting even cheaper.
The operator had to place one spaceband, along with other fixed-width spacing elements to safely achieve wider spacing. It was never a problem with trained Linotype operators, but when teletypesetting became common, the typesetting task was largely given over to typists rather than typesetters.
The teletypesetter used a typewriter keyboard layout where the spacebar would drop a spaceband. In this situation it would be a serious no-no to press the spacebar twice. Either operators were strictly forbidden from this, or more likely, the teletypesetter itself would not allow it. Teletypesetters still had the option to use other fixed-space elements, but the transition to unskilled labor meant this was not likely to be a focus in a busy newspaper.
An excellent article! Thanks for sharing. A movie about linotype? Styles change. Type evolves. Proponents of the emspace have as much to stand on as detractors. I learned in junior high typing to space twice after a period at the end of a sentence but that was many years ago. I think the aesthetic of typography dictates in many circumstances whether to space once or twice after a period. Interestingly, your examples show two spaces in justified text and one space in ragged-right e.
The enspace character is included as a usable unicode character in digital typography but I have been unable to find a single example of it or instructions for its use. I think it may sometimes appear between footnote numbers and the text that follows them.
The affects of justification on the examples are, in fact, mentioned in the article. Justification was usually handled by adjusting only the word spacing.
Notice that even in the justified examples, the spacing after a period is proportionally wider than the spacing between words. Additionally, a non-justified example was appended to the article to address that very concern. Firstly: Great article Dave; fascinating commentary and it just goes to prove that something new is learnt everyday! Guru and Genius he most certainly was. It just kind of evolved that way! Not all typographic styles were successful, true; some were stunningly elegant, powerful, artistic and best of all effective; some even in my own judgement when viewed later were at best illegible, unsightly, ugly and even just downright hideous!
They give my eyes a break, and after staring at type all my life they sure deserve it! Thanks Graham. Excellent comment. Do you have any recollections to that effect? Have worked in many composing rooms in factories, Colleges and Universities and practices vary considerably depending on a myriad of reasons.
Ignorance, staff competence, pricing and costs, and skills, experience and knowledge of style. Graphic Designers in my experience these days dictate their own style! Terms such as ranged left setting, justified setting or centred setting all seem to be closely related to Set Width as the main determinant of setting criteria. There are also cases of letterform widths determining style. I have also heard a lot about reading speeds being dually related to even the character stroke thickness and counter size.
Many printers use as much spacing as they can to make more pages never mind saving paper! Last point, and I have many, later typewriters gave variable spacing and virtually was as good as phototypesetting!
The compositors in those days were magicians? I agree. Those hot metal typographers were artists and magicians. The digital tools are fantastic but of what value are they if the old styles are lost?
Thanks, Jim. More than likely, during that time, the emspace was standard and as you suggest relied upon as a visible separator. Why regress to broken typography from centuries before with rivers of white space, not an added design feature when a period signifies the end of a sentence.
Anybody ever hear of Jan Tschichold, or the fine press movement, fine typography? Some people feel that the extra space helps to separate the sentence as an encapsulated thought. Others see rivers of white space. Certainly, anyone attempting to create authentic historicist design should employ the emspace. Wide spacing served typographers and readers for centuries. Whichever style you choose, awareness of historical context should inform the technique. As for the justified examples, notice that the spaces are still twice as wide as others in the same line.
Once you get to phototypeset examples, the spaces, including those after a period, are opened equally to justify a given line. If the publisher of my book chooses to change the spacing after my periods, as part of a considered use of font and style, that would not be problem for me. But now I see that a lot of books use single spacing after the period. Me, too! I just found this out from a friend. I feel like I just came back from living on Mars.
Double spaced has always been the rule. Finding post examples that largely stem from non-academic publications does not serve as a defense for an academic convention. Moreover, the APA calls for two spaces. Now it is true that the APA itself briefly fell prey to this pop-convention in the early 90s, but they have since reverted to the canonized tradition as it should be.
And accordingly, educators being under the umbrella of psychology and the APA should follow that rule in secondary pedagogy and collegiate pedagogy.
Of course, there are those like you that break this convention and standard, but that is an illegitimate and callous disregard for accepted conventions in education. Moreover, this idea that scholarly writing has been this way for some time is absurd. The APA rule change never caught in secondary and college, and has still not caught on now. I suggest you do some scholarly research on secondary and college uses of the double space and suspect you will find the opposite of your contention.
I could be wrong, but this sure seems to be pop-academic scholarship and, in my opinion, is totally ridiculous and offensive.
No wonder the MLA and Chicago are so poo-poo-ed in academic circles. What boggles my mind is that anyone cares about this issue. Mainstream publishing abandoned wide spacing 60 years ago.
As for academic publishing, the half-inch margins, typefaces like Courier and Times that lack the features needed for proper book design, and other archaic specifications seem rooted in the notion that good typography must imitate a typewriter. If you like APA, use it.
Academics can hate MLA and CMOS all they want though I never met any design academics who hated one style guide more than another , but anyone with a basic knowledge of typography will suggest that they all — APA included — need some major revisions. Scholarly writing is largely a typographic lost cause, and my article never suggested that the single-space standard was universally applicable in that area.
Interesting read, being a young man I never knew of or about the double space after a period. You never can know too much about the origins of anything in history that has brought us to the place we are at today.
Great article again. Thanks to all for the education. And yes, the Wikipedia article is excellent. In many cases, Wikipedia is not a trustable source but this seems to be a good one. Interesting read. I saw the two spaces disappear from our publishing house policy manual which I wrote in , when my research and publishing center at Penn collaborated with the American Psychological Association APA Style Book policymakers to drop the two spaces at multiple levels.
What drove that push, especially on my part, was multifaceted. Design was as important as content. We learned that people would read our messages more often and more intently if we made it more pleasing to the eye, more engaging with graphic design.
We learned that even though the words were important, the entire package was just as important. We turned dry academic writing into engaging policy-changing publications. Plus we learned we had enormous control over that design of the words and images on the page without going through a distant typesetter who only worked with putting the words on the paper.
To me, it is fascinating. But I do like the idea of knowing the rules now to break them and use two spaces again, if it suited the specific design purpose to do so. Single spacing after the end-of-sentence punctuation eliminates this contrast. The added bit of white space — also a design element — makes the text easier to read.
I think the perceived need for control down to this level squelches creativity. It might as well be decreed that good style and aesthetic sensibility in print means that all sentences should contain the same number of letters and spaces. Or perhaps we should do as was done in the ancient world and use no punctuation and no spaces between words. I suppose we could get used to that; however, as soon as there was less need to conserve writing material, punctuation and space evolved, and have served the text, and readers, well.
Thanks for this article! I have been wondering about this. I was strongly taught the 2 spaces after a period style. I graduated from high school in I graduated from college and took occasional graduate level classes up until — always using the double space with no comments from professors.
About 10 years ago, I noticed my high school students using one space. I corrected them and made them do 2 spaces. I thought it was just laziness and lack of attention to detail. I just wrote my first book and; yep, they changed all my 2 spaces to one space. I like the old way because it notifies my brain that there is a stronger break after a period than a comma — which, of course, the punctuation itself tells me — but it accentuates that visually.
Notice one space after periods in this comment. I am giving in…. The Spanish comma after dash is standard indeed.
Spacing was not as much of a problem on my portable Olivetti as was capitalization which forced me to hold down the full weight of the carriage with my pinky while striking the correct letter. That led to very tired pinkies for any lengthy research paper! Fascinating to see the things which incite passionate discussion. And occasional misguided vitriol. See my article on hyphens dots and dashes. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. Dave, I really enjoyed your article and the ensuing discussions perhaps even more so!
True but see the addendum at the bottom. Others levied the same criticism so I dug a but deeper. The last example is fully justified and the spaces between words are the same as the spaces after periods. See what you think and thanks for writing. Yes, I did examine the addendum — but my guess is that this text was set with a Linotype machine, not hand-set like the earlier examples…my point being that the elimination of extra spaces was a function of the movement away from text that was BOTH hand-set and justified, a condition which applied to the majority of printed materials other than newspapers created prior to the s.
Clearly, resolving this will require a larger sample of texts that are known to be printed in different ways. Good observations, Hal. Let me know if you find anything interesting to add. This was wonderful! As an editor for a magazine and several websites I am constantly removing the double spaces after periods. I laughed out loud when you stated that the typesetter would remove them, as I sure do. But not only the double spaces. We have a style sheet that we strictly follow and we expect articles submitted to follow too.
So often this is not the case. Each time I receive an article I go through and do an auto find and replace of all these issues before I get down to the task of making magic with the words. Thanks for the article! This is a really fascinating debate, Dave. Spooky, I must have been assimilated.
Or maybe I have been able to fight off the Borg. Phew, got a little confused there. Fascinating read! Personally my brain prefers the double space. Often I find my eyes darting back after passing over a single space at the end of a sentence. Was that the end, did I see it right? Also, when submitting to a publisher for publication it seems important to adhere to their particular preferences.
Seems like good ideas and creativity would almost always trump punctuation. The purpose for two spaces at the end of a sentence is to distinguish the period at the end of a sentence from the period after an abbreviation. I will never change to one space. Modern usage is to exclude periods from abbreviations; an excellent progression. Therefore the double space is no longer needed in books, but I use it for daily writing.
One point I meant to mention in my previous comment is that the space and extra space served an important indicator for a pause. One of my first jobs around was as a broadcast journalist and also a stringer for United Press operating an old-fashioned teletype machine.
Two spaces following the period after a sentence indicated a pause long enough for a breath by the newsreader and enough time to count to one mentally. The single space indicated no breath, the same as between words, so that the news script flowed with no break. A paragraph break was a breath long enough for you to count to two mentally. I totally agree with you, Maralyn. I began word processing on a Micom dedicated word processor back in the Seventies, and the Micom program defined a sentence as a string of words ending with a sentence-ending punctuation mark.
And, it is simply more logical that one space separates words, two spaces separate sentences, and a new line separates paragraphs. I also saw somewhere that it was computer programmers who started this single inter-sentence spacing in the Sixties because they could not allow double spacing in their code, and they simply carried that coding style over to their other typing, and some non-programmers followed.
I am currently writing a style manual for a small company, and you can bet that I will be encouraging them to be logical in their style, not merely compliant to recent fashion. The real issue is how the brain perceives the difference between a comma and a period.
As a result, your brain recognizes impressions of borders and outlines. This is why some fonts are easier to read than others, and also why the internet is rife with misspellings and speak. Double Spacing allows for people to more easily recognize a hard break in the cantor of the speech or narrative.
And yes, I use this reasoning as a definitive control of how my readers even breathe when they read my books. The best way to determine if my comedy or action sequences are successful is by giving people excerpts and watching their physical reactions.
John Rocket fight scenes cause almost all readers to squint their eyes, furrow their brows, flush red and breathe quicker, while comedy scenes in Andrew Colon force people to hold their breaths and laugh where I place the punctuation — not at any other time. Sometimes justification or special fonts forces me to alter this approach in order to get the desired effect, but that is rare. This is design rather than blind rules-following.
The break was clear and no need to emphasize it. Two spaces when set in type makes for holes that slow down reading and look lousy. Full stop! I mean, period. This is an absurd discussion! What kind of question or statement is that? Another reason self-publishing requires hiring a professional editor.
And not your best friend who teaches high school English. Also,when you submit your mss to a publishing house please Google that it has to be formatted, at least in some organized way. Something lost in the world of self-publishng vanity press. The documents used as examples, I think that at the time they were published, women were oppressed and slavery was still legal. Your productive contribution to the conversation will be appreciated by all the readers here.
Please do not post on my blog again. Disagreement, debate, and critique is welcome here but I have no room for vitriol. I was about to politely slam him with an educational history on punctuation and how it has nothing to do with vanity press, then saw your response and felt no need ;D. As if publishers are some kind of mighty race with favours to bestow upon mere mortals such as us…! Much of what you say misses the point of the discussion entirely, degrading into a bit of an off-topic rant.
In at typing school, using manual typewriters we always put two spaces between a full stop and the begining of the next sentence. In when I was learning publishing design using PageMaker one of the first things I was corrected on was that only one space was used after a fullstop. Order of entries - Alphabetical order by author. If there is no author, use the title of the document. If you have more than one entry by the same author, o rder the entries alphabetically by title, and use three hyphens in place of the author's name for every entry after the first.
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