Have you ever shared a room at night with a mosquito?
Tiny things can ruin what should be a straightforward experience. Don’t deal with the mosquito, and you’re in for a bad night’s sleep at best. Leave a spelling mistake on your web site because it seems insignificant to you – and it’s your customers who will be complaining and not coming back.
Writing great copy involves not only choosing the right words, but also caring how those words appear. Font choice and size, line length, punctuation, paragraph length – all these are part of the readers’ experience of your message.
Many of these decisions are subjective. How much space to leave between sentences, for example: surely it is up to the author to decide what is most fitting?
Yes, and no.
Where a writer decides that the once-popular double space (so-called English spacing) looks best, then fair enough. But my contention is that most of that time the decision is not based on looks – but because someone once told the typist that this is correct.
And nobody wants to get it wrong.
Let me alleviate the pressure on the double space defenders and point out that, on the web, double spacing makes no sense at all.
Double spaces originate from physical type
In ye olde worlde of typewriters the typefaces were monospaced – that is, characters were exactly the same width as each other (even the m and the i). Every letter, symbol, and even the spaces were the same width. This gave a regimented appearance to the text, in which a space between two sentences could get lost among the identical spaces between words.
Enter the double space – just to make sure no one missed the start of a new sentence.
However, on the web, monospaced fonts are rare. We write in what are called proportionally spaced fonts, where each letter takes up an appropriate amount of space. Add to that the short paragraphs that we write in, and the other design elements that make our typing much easier to read, and there really is no need for double spacing at all.
In other words, on the web, there is no double space rule to break. Unless you are a graphic designer working with a monotype font, there is no need to hark back to the days of the typewriter and get all uppity about the gaps.
A single space looks and reads better
Now we know that there is no rule to break, the main consideration is more subjective: what looks and reads the best?
Of course, it is a matter of opinion, and here is mine: I think double spacing looks wrong. When I am editing, I correct it. It creates little holes all over the copy, and disrupts the flow of sentences that are already adequately spaced.
By all means comment below and defend the English spacing. But I want to know how it looks and reads on a web page, not what your typing tutor said in 1971.
By the way, there is a sin far more heinous than double spacing. It’s called inconsistent spacing, where some sentences are divided by a single space, and some by a double space, on the same page.
That’s like having a whole scourge of mosquitoes in the room.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
It depends on your content management system, of course, but double-spacing tends to get squished by the fact that html doesn’t display it unless you make a special effort.
Another reason not to do it, and a reason why my failure to break my double-spacing habit, despite best efforts, doesn’t punish the reader.
Hmm. I agree there are print writing standards that don’t fit well in web medium, but line spacing is a tricky area to get firm on in the web.
For one thing, there are usability studies showing that more spacing than just single spacing is easier to read. I’m a web user and this is definitely true for me. Your web copy here looks to have about a spacing of 1.5.
Also, there is no “line spacing” element or attribute in HTML, so when an author sees a WYSIWYG button in a rich-text web editor to double-space lines, the button is selling “line height” under the false print terms.
Line-height is quite variable in HTML, and for good reason; browser inconsistencies, differences in font design, differences in font rendering behavior at different sizes, and so forth.
Also, there’s this thing called “inheritance” in HTML/CSS where child elements can be defined one way (e.g., line-height) which in turn will be influenced by an attribute set on the parent (e.g., font-size). So a font having a font-size set at 11px will have a different line-height set at 1.5 than one that has the same line-height on a font size at 14px, for example. Things become extremely relative.
And there’s that usability thing I mentioned. While I agree that the equivalent of “double” spaced line-height is more than necessary, I do believe that 1.5 should be a minimum no matter what copy, website or font size.
I generally set the line-height at 1.5 (or use units when it involves list item heights for specific presentation) and things work out OK.
Ken – I still get clients submitting double-spaced sentences and grumbling when I remove them. Next time, I’ll just blame the html for taking them out!
Destry – I think we’re at cross purposes here. I’m talking about spaces between sentences (width) and you’re talking about line spacing (at least that way we both get to be right).
TeX uses a heuristic to determine sentence endings and make spaces after them slightly wider than a normal space.
A similar approach could be used on the Web but I’m not sure it’s really worth the effort. Perhaps I’ll make a plugin once I’ve finished my flux capacitor.
This Wikipedia page has some more relevant information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing