Word Wise: Spaced Out

Word Wise: Spaced Out
"Despite what you learned in typing class, stop using two spaces after a period. It’s nothing more than a habit – one worth breaking. ("Curious things, habits,” Agatha Christie wrote in “Witness for the Prosecution.” “People themselves never knew they had them.”)

The practice of double spacing after a period is a holdover from the days when typewriters had “monofaced” type, meaning fonts in which every letter had exactly the same width (in other words, “m” used the same amount of space as “i”). Because of the monoface font, two spaces after a period made it easier to see where one sentence ended and another began."