Writing Tips

Spacing (1)

Understanding the various types of spaces and their uses is typically a compositor's job. But in today's work world, where a writer may be composing or editing directly into a publishing system, it pays to know something about these tiny gaps in the fabric of your prose.

"Soft" and "Hard" Spaces
Computerized word processing and desktop publishing systems have forced most writers to become aware of the hard space. Actually, "hard" is not a particular type of space, but a characteristic that different types of spaces may exhibit.

Consider, for the moment, a standard word space, which you typically add to a document by pressing the spacebar on your computer or typewriter keyboard. By definition, a standard space is "soft". When formatting paragraphs, a computerized compositing system can create a line break at any soft space. If a space is "hard", then the system is prohibited from placing a line break at that particular point.

When you are creating or editing book material that will be formatted and reformatted over time by an automated system, you should take care always to insert hard word spaces in appropriate locations. In the examples that follow, a dot indicates the hard space.

• Insert a hard space between a number expressed as digits and the adjacent word that gives meaning to the number:
  Chapter·11
  120·MB
  pages·5 to·17
  6·km
  May·1, 1997 (or 1·May 1997)
   
• Insert a hard space between a courtesy title and the person's name:
  Mr.·Jones
  Ms.·Smith
   
• Insert a hard space between multiple personal initials:

J.·R.·R. Tolkien (Yes, spaces should always appear between multiple initials!)
 

• Insert a hard space between the first-person, singular pronoun and the adjacent word, particularly when the pronoun starts a sentence:

I·saw three ships come sailing in.
The Egg and·I
 

• Insert a hard space between any other two units of composition whose appearance or meaning would suffer if separated:

123·123·123 (social insurance number)
A1A·1A1 (postal code)

Note that the above guidelines apply principally to book material. In journalistic applications such as newspapers and magazines, they are often ignored, because the combination of narrower, justified columns and frequent hard spaces would tend to produce rivers (meandering tracts of white space running through the interior of a column).

See also Spacing 2 for a discussion of the various sizes of spaces, and their applications.