Possible to Change Spacing between Sentences?

[Guest]

I have a long document where I have 1 space between sentences. My english
teacher insits that I have 2 spaces between every sentence. Im wondering if
there a fast way to do this. Some kind of find and replace all? I mean i know
Visual Basic is intergerated into word or something. Isnt there a way to make
a marco or something that would do this?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

If you go to Tools | Options, Spelling and Grammar panel, click on
Settings..., you can tell Word that 2 spaces between sentences is correct.
Then when you run Tools | Spelling and Grammar, Word will flag 1 space
between sentences and let you Change All.

You can also use Find & Replace, but it's a little complicated, as it has to
account for sentences ending in .!? Etc. Any Find and Replace can easily be
recorded and saved as a one-click macro. Someone will probably come along
and give you that solution as well, and it would work better for individual
documents.

Your teacher is a little outdated‹2 spaces between sentences was a rule
developed in the days of typewriter fonts--but not totally unreasonable--I
still find 1 space between sentences looks crowded to me.

 

[Opinicus]

I have a long document where I have 1 space between
sentences. My english
teacher insits that I have 2 spaces between every
sentence. Im wondering if

Offhand I'd say you have more issues with your English
teacher than "two spaces after a period ending a sentence".

Be that as it may, if you full justify the document, your
teacher will most likely be unable to determine how many
spaces you've entered anywhere.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info. I actually used the find and replace like you said,
although I had to watch it so It would not change things like Mr. and etc.
like you said. In the future i'll just set 2 spaces as the deafult in the
options. I think that 1 space works fine, but I'm figureing out that its all
about what your teacher thinks is right. Also do you guys know if indenting
is still used widely. I used to not ident and just skip a line, but now my
teacher also says that indenting is the "correct" way. I guess he right but I
thought that a lot of people had stop indenting or something. Anyway Thanks
for the ideas.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Technical documents tend to use extra space between paragraphs instead of
indenting each paragraph, possibly borrowed from the way formatting for the
web works, not sure about the origins of that.

Indenting the first line of each paragraph is *certainly* the correct way,
when it comes to English papers, and most papers in the humanities. No one
has stopped indenting--look at any academic (non-technical) book. Also,
school papers are usually double-spaced, and extra space between
double-spaced paragraphs does not look very good, in my opinion.

For the information on how to set up the Find&Replace so that you could use
Replace All, start here:
http://gmayor.com/replace_using_wildcards.htm

 

[Graham Mayor]

The grammar checker has an option to check spaces between sentences -
however, double spacing between sentences is a practice that dates back to
typewriters and their monospaced fonts. Proportional fonts do not require
them. The use of spacing between sentences is an issue that pops up
regularly. There is no right and wrong, only preference.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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