Fixing double-spaces after periods
Before I was a screenwriter, I worked in graphic design, with a font collection that was the envy of my dorm floor. So it’s life’s cruel joke that I now make my living in 12-pt. Courier.
Modern typefaces are designed to look best with a single space after the period which ends a sentence. (Or the full stop, for the British in the room.) Courier, however, is not such a typeface. As a monospace font, it looks best with two spaces after the period.
When writing a script, it’s pretty easy to type two spaces sometimes, one space other times. Before printing the “final” draft, you could scroll through the whole document, looking for periods with only one space. But it’s much easier to use Find and Replace.
This trick works in pretty much any word processor, including both Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter.
Converting to two spaces
- Choose “Find…”
- In the Find field, type . followed by two spaces.
- In the Replace field, type . followed one space.
- Click Replace All. You should get a dialog box that shows a large number of changes. Yes, you’ve just made every sentence wrong. What’s important is that they’re all wrong in exactly the same way.
- Back in the Find field, type . followed one space.
- In the Replace field, type . followed by two spaces.
- Click Replace All.
- Look through the script. You should have two spaces after every period. However, you may find that you also have two spaces in case where you shouldn’t (like after “Mr.” or “Dr.”).
- If so, Find “Mr.” followed by two spaces, and Replace with “Mr.” followed by one space.
- Repeat as needed with “Dr.” or “Mrs.”
In my opinion, Courier looks best with two spaces after the colon as well. The same technique works.
In programs that allow it, a technically-savvy wordsmith could use regular expressions to do all of this in one step, matching the period only in cases where it is followed by exactly one space. But considering this whole process generally takes less than 20 seconds, I’m not sure it’s worth it.
If you find yourself writing a letter or some other document in a non-Courier font, you may want to do just the opposite, converting two spaces to one. That’s a lot easier.
Converting to one space
- Choose “Find…”
- In the Find field, type . followed by two spaces.
- In the Replace field, type . followed by one space.
- Click Replace All.
- Keep clicking Replace All until there are no more replacements. (It may take a few times through.)
- Look through the script. You should have one space after every period.
Articles
June 10th, 2005 at 8:52 am
At first I thought this was the most ridiculous piece of advice that you’ve ever given and that maybe you’ve been spending too much time in your garage…
Then I actually tried putting an extra space at the end of a sentenct with 12-Pt. Courrier. You’re right, it does look better.
Now, I wonder what the Academy will think?
Thanks for your site! It has been a great help.
-Gregg
June 10th, 2005 at 9:17 am
What is your feelings on Courier New? At a screenwriter’s workshop the ‘host’ says that Courier New is the ‘new’ preferred font for submissions. Does it really matter what style of Courier we use? Afterall, I think Final Draft uses its own version too…
June 10th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Does the ‘industry’ as a whole prefer one or two? Or does the ‘industry’ really give a damn one way or the other?
“…don’t say ‘industry’…”
June 10th, 2005 at 10:22 am
Not only does two-spaces look better than one, it makes the whole enterprise much easier to read out loud. Go to a table read for a poorly-typed script, and listen to actors speed-read right over one sentence into the next, pause, back up, and try to re-creat the thought because there was a single-space between sentences. Two-spaces? Poof! Actor-proof!
And, FYI, double-spacing after a sentence happens Automatically in the beloved Movie Magic Screenwriter.
June 10th, 2005 at 11:13 am
I prefer Courier to Courier New or Final Draft Courier, but you should use whatever looks best on your screen and/or printer.
June 10th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Courier New is a disaster. Besides being too thin and a strain on the eyes, the leading will cause your page count to balloon out of control. My 107-page script with Courier Final Draft becomes a 129-page script with Courier New.
June 10th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
Of course, if you’re old school and learned how to type on a Selectric, you’d know you’re supposed to put two spaces after a period.
June 10th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Courier Final Draft looks best printed out and gives you more words per page. Always a good thing. It’s a bit faint to read on my screen, though. So I SELECT ALL and click BOLD while I’m writing, so it’s easier on the eyes.
June 10th, 2005 at 9:09 pm
If it were up to me, there’d be no periods at all. Then you don’t have to give space.
But then my girlfriend would probably get tired of me.
June 10th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Mrs. Behringer (freshman year typing) taught me to put two spaces after the period, and by God, that’s what I do.
It drives me nuts when software removes the extra space. Like, say, WordPress is doing right now. Or the way Movable Type does on my blog.
Bastards! GIVE ME BACK MY SPAAAAAACE!!!!!!!!
June 10th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
I’m convinced Courier Final Draft is responsible for their being so many more deleted scenes showing up on DVD than there used to be. Courier FD is so compressed, it undoes the page-per-minute ratio, and a 110-page script turns into 130 minutes of screen time. You add the Line Spacing cheats that John’s brought up previously, and you’ve got six hours of screen time crammed into a script that appears to be barely ninety pages long.
June 10th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
…by “their being so many more…”, I meant, of course, “there being…”
June 10th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
Geeky side-note, Mr. Mazin:
It’s not WordPress that’s swallowing your spaces; it’s XHTML, which by default ignores multiple spaces. This is a Good Thing, because it lets you format your code in a human-readable way, while not confusing the poor browser trying to interpret it.
June 11th, 2005 at 12:12 am
The first thing I ever wrote (EVER) was about 16 years ago, in 8th grade, when I wrote a story about how the teachers were killing the students. My teacher, Bill Sanders, was looking over my shoulder while I was typing. He was enjoying the story, cause I heard him laughing over my shoulder. He then said to me, “You should put two spaces after a period, it looks better.” Since then, I have done so. And little did I know at the time that that was the way to go.
Thanks Bill.
June 11th, 2005 at 3:01 am
Hmmph. Hmmph, I say.
June 11th, 2005 at 7:17 am
Find and Replace is indeed a powerful tool, especially in Word where you can search with wildcards and on format as well.
In Movie Magic Screenwriter, though, it’s much easier than all that. Take a trip to File > Program Options > Spelling and find near the bottom “Auto-Space Sentences to [select #] Spaces.� Change that to “2� and it’ll always be done for you from the start.
Everyone using MMS should take a long, slow stroll through its options. If the folks at SSI haven’t thought of everything, I’m not sure what they’ve missed.
June 11th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
I’ve always double-spaced after any punctuation but commas (except for starting a quote which gets one space after the comma but before the parenthese). Then again, I started writing 20 years ago on a typewriter and my mother was no slouch in teaching me how to type properly.
Do they actually teach to only space once now?
June 11th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
And strike the redundant except from that rule I just wrote. Double-space after everything but commas.
sigh
I really should proofread before hitting submit.
June 11th, 2005 at 8:44 pm
And, if I may presume, don’t forget to Search and Replace “!” followed by two spaces and “?” followed by two spaces.
I always put two spaces after every sentence ending punctuation mark until I followed some bad advice and switched over to one. After reading John’s entry, I went and switched back on my current draft. It looks better. It reads better. It’s just better.
June 11th, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Blaine:
An oversight on my part. Absolutely. Exclamation points and question marks need two spaces in Courier.
April 5th, 2006 at 6:18 am
[...] Apparently I’m not the only one who stumbles without longer spaces between sentences. This comment on screenwriter John August’s blog points out that actors reading aloud stumble less when there’s extra space between sentences. This isn’t a totally fair comparison, because he’s talking about a typewritten (monospaced) script. Nevertheless, it supports the idea that the spacing between sentences should be distinct from the spacing between words to help the reader. [...]
January 31st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
HELP! Is this in word it won’t work. i can’t find “Find” Can someone help? I am doing it in Word if that makes a difference. Thanks!
June 1st, 2007 at 1:31 am
I just had to strip out double spaces while typesetting a thing for printing. I did indeed use my word processor’s find-and-replace, which worked reasonably well (though it wasn’t so hot at replacing straight quotes with curly ones; next time I will learn not to do my first draft in a text editor).
Don’t forget also to check for double spaces after a sentence in quotation marks. (e.g. “Oh, just wonderful.” He threw the newspaper down again.)