Editors: Totally Spaced Out?

I had no idea my sister's best friend from high school is an editor. I saw a post on her Facebook account telling all writers to stop putting in two spaces after periods. Arg! I've been doing 2 spaces this whole time!

Can anyone speak to this rule?

I've only recently become aware that two spaces are not always preferred but I have no idea when this change came about.

I have to admit that using two spaces is a habit now, though, and one that I can't break if I am going to keep my day job. Soo...I guess I use "Find and Replace" to get rid of them when I am done writing!

Two spaces is a holdover from the days of typewriters when it was more difficult to see the separation between sentences. I'd heard that editors now tend to prefer a single space after a sentence, but I don't know if it is a hard and fast rule.

I switched to a single space as soon as I heard it was acceptable because I found it was easy to accidentally put one or three spaces between sentences. A single space helped me with consistency.

MS Word spell checker catches two spaces as a mistake. My guess is that editors get tired of seeing all the faulty space warnings. Even though they can fix it with find and replace, there is always a remote chance some legitimate spacing will be screwed up. I'd suggest switching to single space. Editors seem to look for the smallest reasons to reject manuscripts. Better not to provide one knowingly.

It's a matter of house style. That is: You need to know what THIS editor at THIS publisher or magazine prefers. And that information ought to be on their website.

If the submission guidelines say one space, do it that way. If they say two spaces, do it that way. If it's not said, do it your way.

And if the guidelines say four spaces, or no spaces at all, follow the guidelines.

I'm not aware of any market that asks for two spaces, but if they did it would be spelled out in the guidelines.

I don't forbid this, but I am planning on it because I am the one that has to remove all of those spaces when we format the story for print. It really sucks on a 5,000 word story. The only reason I haven't so far is because most people don't submit stories that way any more so it only happens once or twice for each issue. Besides, few writers bother to read the guidelines anyway.

Since a market would ask for it specifically if they wanted it, I think it is better to not do it or as suggested here, remove them with find, replace before you submit (thanks for that by the way, it never occurred to me to use that for empty spaces, but I will now).

I'm an unrepentant two-spacer myself...

The Chicago Manual of Style sayeth:

The view at CMOS is that there is no reason for two spaces after a period in published work.

...and they make five good points why that is the case.

But I think Dan's advice is more correct. Know what the publisher wants before you send. I've been double spacing for decades, and I was told by my editor that one space is the standard now, preferred by editors and publishers. It was an extremely difficult habit to break.

You can change Microsoft Word to check for 1 or 2 spaces between sentences, or to ignore checking for sentence spacing:

• In word 2003 it's under Options>Spelling and Grammar>Settings.
  
• In Word 2007 it's under Word Options>Proofing>Settings>Required
  

You can easily Find/Replace 2-spaces with 1 space, but it is difficult to go the other way, although it can be done. You would have to Find/Replace all Period-single-space with Period-double-space AND all Question-mark-single-space with Question-mark-double-space etc. if that makes sense. Then, you would need to proofread for internal sentence punctuation that got screwed up.

Or if you're code-savvy, you could write a macro in Word to do it automatically.

Or if you're lazy, you could download a program to convert docs between 1 and 2 spaces.

-Z

What happens if your are not tech-savvy, lazy, but also paranoid about how new downloads interact with Vista (how I loathe thee, Vista)?

*sigh*

I think that I will stick with Find/Replace...

I wrote a program that instantly formats spacings and capitalizations. So, with a press of a button, a sentence like this:

" hi ! this is a --sentence , " Lenny said . " i like to bivouac . " -( lenny died . )

Turns into:

"Hi! This is a sentence," Lenny said. "I like to bivouac." (Lenny died.)

The program can distinguish the beginnings of quotes from the ends, and it capitalizes things that for some reason or other Word misses. (Also, unlike the sentence-case function in Word, it doesn't mercilessly lowercase the names.)

The program can enforce a two-space rule, which I've only had to use once, ever.