Microsoft Word will soon begin marking two spaces between sentences as an error.

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It’s wrong to use two spaces between sentences, Microsoft Word says

The style choice will now be marked as an error in Microsoft Word — and users who press the space bar twice after a period will be met with those dreaded blue squiggly lines.

The change … is rolling out gradually across Word, so users may not notice it until their software updates.

The habit of using two spaces is a relic from the era of typewriters, when typists spaced twice to more clearly define the end of a sentence. Characters were “monospaced” back then, which means they took up the same amount of space on the page — today, most fonts adjust the width of characters so sentences are easier to read. … Very few style guides advise using two spaces after a period. …

If you absolutely cannot part with your beloved double space, here’s what you can do: When Word marks it as an error, right click to view your options. You can ask Word to ignore this issue …

It’s wrong to use two spaces between sentences, Microsoft Word says

Microsoft has settled the great space debate, and sided with everyone who believes one space after a period is correct, not two. The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app.
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Feedback to the change has been overwhelmingly positive.
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Expect to see the new changes in Word roll out to everyone in the coming months.

Congratulations, fellow one-spacers.

Microsoft Word now flags double spaces as errors, ending the great space debate

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lmacri, SueW, Cybertooth

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MS dictates this stupidity, …
– When it no longer permits Word to add auto-correct entries to the auto-correct data base with a right-click?
– When Word’s Title Case still wrongly capitalizes articles and prepositions (which WordPerfect got right as far back as 1996)?
– When Word’s asinine styles and section breaks continue to confound secretaries and lawyers and ruin long documents?
– When Word still cannot properly set up a Table of Contents?
– When we still need third-party software to do automatic paragraph numbering correctly?
– When Track Changes looks different on different readers’ screens and we still need third-party software to do actual redlines?
I could go on.  Word is the worst word-processing program I have ever seen and over the last twenty years has been the bane of my work as a transactional lawyer immersed in long, complex documents.  In the legal profession, because it is impossible to use Word correctly, documents always look like they’ve been used as toilet paper by elephants.
And now we will be forced to use the wrong number of spaces after a sentence!!
If you ever see a photo of Bill Gates with a black eye, you’ll know I finally had a chance to thank him for Word.

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SueW, Cybertooth

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glnz wrote:

And now we will be forced to use the wrong number of spaces after a sentence!!

One has been the right number for decades, but you won’t be forced to use it.

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Of course there are alternatives to Word. OpenOffice or LibreOffice. If you think the Word is the worst editor, try the others. I subscribed to betatesting program of LibreOffice and to be honest, its not good, its buggy. But stable releases are OK. Word is still the most complex and most functional for me.

I disabled automatic corrections, when something was making me crazy. Dispite the fact, that its everchanging and MS pushes something you dont like, its still the most used word processor.

– When it no longer permits Word to add auto-correct entries to the auto-correct data base with a right-click?

I am not aware, that you cant add custom words into dictionary. Still works for me in Office version 2103 (build 13901.20400).

But you can create documents in whatever you like – even Wordpad could do the job and print it into PDF.

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“We know best, so do as we say, OK?” is not a great attitude to have when defining the functionality of a tool for writing whatever its users need or want to write in any way that seems appropriate to them — even if this means using a unicorn picture instead of the letter “U”–  because what one needs to write and how can be something very different, in different situations, for different people. Occasionally, the true reason for limiting a product capabilities is for its makers to save themselves the work and costs associated with fixing it, or of developing it much further, something that might include text-editors. But since the text editor discussed here was already a more or less decent one some years ago, none of this removal of flexibility for the user makes even business sense, or at least one that I can understand. (But, then again, I’ve never been much of a businessman — a limitation that runs in the family.)

For my part, I am still in Office 2010 in the Windows 7 PC and Office 2016 in the Mac. Their editors may not be exactly ideal, but are serviceable for most things I do. And, as far as I am concerned, they are going to stay in those two machines until a reputedly very hot place freezes over. Or they die of old age.

And no, I do not download found Word documents.

 

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OscarCP wrote:

none of this removal of flexibility for the user makes even business sense

There’s no removal of flexibility here.

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You are right and I stand corrected. What we actually have here, is unnecessary and intrusive error-flagging that is pointlessly annoying. What would be interesting to clarify here is whether there is a way of dumbing-down this new feature (without doing this also to other, useful editor ones) so it goes away and lets the writer write as he or she intends, with the occasional useful warning, instead of acting as a nagging “I know better than you” correcting robot when that is not called for.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
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Word can be set to ignore the error or to expect two spaces instead of one:

How to Stop Microsoft Word From Marking Two Spaces After a Period as an Error

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doriel, SueW, OscarCP

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If it also flags double spaces between words, it is just acting to alert you to possible typographical errors. I sometimes bobble the space bar and get an unwanted double space, and it’s easier to miss that on a proofread than, say, an extra lettter.

I don’t have a problem with Word doing this, as it is the convention now to use a single space, and of course it is configurable if you don’t like the default setting.

I used the double space for several decades, but as I mentioned, I switched a while ago (my older posts on this site have double spaces; you could probably pinpoint the moment I made the change to the day). The argument that “got” me has nothing to do with style guides or anything like that, but more of the computer science angle. Typed characters are data, and things like kerning that text are now handled by the computer automatically for the best readability. The spacing after a period is no different, and a period (or question mark, or exclamation point) followed by a space is a clear signal to the program in question that it is the end of the sentence and that it is time to apply the inter-sentence spacing, much as a newline (CRLF in Microsoftian, LF in Linux) signals a new paragraph (so go ahead and apply whatever inter-paragraph spacing and indentation that are configured for new paragraphs).

If you think of a space as a word delimiter, which it pretty much is in terms of computer text files, that’s how I see it. We could even get rid of the space after a period if it had no other uses, like in decimal numbers or in URLs, since a period would always delimit a word even without the space.

 

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“Microsoft has settled the great space debate, and sided with everyone who believes one space after a period is correct, not two.”

No… Microsoft has not settled anything. It is a software company, not an authority on typography, and if the actual authorities on typography have failed to settle the issue, MS wont either.

I’ve been a double-spacer for decades, and while typewriters were very much a thing when I began typing, I never used them. I cut my teeth, keyboard-wise, on a Commodore 64 (the Timex/Sinclair 1000 I had prior to that had what could be called a keyboard in the loosest sense).

Back then, it was not just typewriters that were monospaced. Word processors and other PC applications were monospace too, typically using 80×25 text mode characters that were built into the video card BIOS, and when those documents were printed using the predefined character set of the printer, those hard copies would be monospaced too. Yes, the goal of word processing back then was to end up with a hard copy, and in that era, the “gold standard” for print quality was the “letter quality” daisywheel printer, which produced output identical to that of a typewriter. Dot matrix printers improved year by year, and soon they were said to produce NLQ (near letter quality) output in the restrike mode on 9-pin printers, and then on the single-strike high quality mode on 24-pin printers. It was all monospaced!

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s (nearly ten years after I started using the Commodore 64) that the MS-DOS computing world (where all the “real” work was done, everyone knew that!) truly gave way to Windows, where the predefined text mode characters were demoted to being seen only during the BIOS POST messages (hopefully; they also comprised the text of BSODs). By then, the use of computers rather than typewriters had been in full swing for some time, and until Windows made proportionate spacing a reality, computers had been all about monospaced, non-graphical fonts.

Not every carryover from a previous time is “wrong” in typographics. In the United States, the convention is to place the period inside a quotation that ends a sentence, and that is a carryover from typesetting machines that would drop the period to the next line if the closing quote was entered first (or something like that). It’s been a long time since that was a thing, but we still put the period inside the quotation marks, much to the chagrin of English-speakers who consider the word ‘color’ to have a ‘u’ in it. In that case, typographic needs redefined correctness, not the other way around.

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SueW, OscarCP, doriel, Cybertooth

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Ascaris wrote:

No… Microsoft has not settled anything. It is a software company, not an authority on typography, and if the actual authorities on typography have failed to settle the issue, MS wont either.

I doubt whether you’d find any authorities on typography still recommending two:

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) was the only style guide that overtly recommended two spaces after a period, and even that long-time holdout for two spaces changed its guideline to one space in its 2019 update.

How Many Spaces Should Be After a Period?

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doriel

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I think it also depends on your language. There is no general rule for all languages, how many spaces there should be. Every country has its own rules for spelling and grammar.

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Kirsty, SueW

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Just a fyi – that’s a year old news item – it’s not a new thing. That said you can make it shut up and accept two spaces pretty quickly.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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b

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You’ve been able to change a bazillion formatting weirdnesses in Word since forever, even all those silly hyphenated words that are never hyphenated.  Style varies with country, industry and probably numerous other factors.

The last source I’d ever use for grammar and puctuation are the folks who brought us narrative conversation experience reach out lean in channel rich shade enjoyment happiness, publish, etc., etc., etc.  Most of what “tech” writes/publishes/posts/blogs is incomprehensible hyperbolic keyword gibberish.  I have a hard time recognizing the rare times “experience” is used correctly; the very word hits a raw nerve.

An entire generation is aping it.  Lunch was disgusting, disturbing, amazing and awesome!    Vox and Salon are where to go to learn style.  Yahoo produced a style manual.

Otherwise two spaces between sentences, one within.  I wonder how Asian languages do it?

“Nerve” above has seven spaces after it, then a return, OMG!!!!!!!!

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anonymous wrote:

Vox and Salon are where to go to learn style. Yahoo produced a style manual.

They’ve all been using single spaces after a period for a decade.

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MS’s decision makes sense to me.WHY?? Well, because ever since I’ve been typing things out using a word processor back in 1991-1993 (Word Perfect 5 and 5.1), I’ve been only single spacing after a period instead of double spacing, and it’s always looked just fine.

I cut my teeth typing on an old Royal typewriter from the 1940’s that my mom used when she was in college, so I know full well that you’re supposed to double space after a period. On an actual typewriter like the one I used, the double spacing helped you distinguish the ends of the sentences without making too much of an effort. (As one of the early posters said in this thread, with the pica and elite fonts typewriters used by default, you HAD to double space in order to make the ends of sentences stand out.)

My favorite typewriter that I have ever used is a tie between a manual typewriter model that was brand new in the late 70’s from Olivetti and a good ol’ IBM Selectric with the curved edges from the same era. At least I think that style of Selectric was from the same era.

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Using only one space between sentences is like wearing suit pants without cuffs.

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[doriel]

I rarely see two spaces between two sentences on the whole internet. Only mr. Anonymous above used two spaces between sentence. Its so little nuance, that it does not make any difference what so ever. Interesting information would be, how much more storage space would be needed, if second space between sentence was inserted in every webpage on the internet. Could someone count it, please? 🙂

Second thing is, that in MS Word, if you use formatting into blocks, size of the space is dynamically adjusted. So each and every space has different size.

In the end that function marking two spaces as an error, could be disabled, if you want 😉

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• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by doriel. Reason: picture
• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by doriel.

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I used to use two spaces between sentences, but Matt Butterick’s practicaltypography.com convinced me to go to one.

Regardless, it would be nice if, when new a software version makes changes like this to defaults, it gave you an initial dialog explaining the changes – and the reasons for them, and the exact locations to set the options, and a choice to accept or reverse the change.

Heck, with Microsoft’s telemetry, that might give them a quick check on whether their decision was the right (or popular) one.

 

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Cybertooth

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