Spaced out in space war: Two spaces between sentences?

Ever since I learned to type, I have been putting two spaces between sentences.  It was not until back a couple days ago when this friend asked me, "Why do you put two spaces between sentences?"

I went... "What?"

Thought that was just the way it is... never even knew it could be a question.

I was all puzzled, thereafter, about how I picked up the two-space habit. It was not until when I was having a dinner with my former out-of-department adviser did I realize that... I was trained under the good old APA style (version forgotten lol) before they changed it to one space and, of course, even longer before they reverted to the recommendation of two spaces for draft manuscript in version 6. (Guess I got total spaced out on the space issue in between... 8-O lol)

So what seems to be the recommendations as per APA and Chicago style?

The Chicago Style goes "one" way—the one-space way; whereas the APA Style (v.6) recommends two spaces between sentences for draft manuscripts but not for the final or published version of a work.

The matter of the fact.. personally... I have been using two spaces between sentences for so long that it actually makes it more cumbersome to type with one space between sentences—kinesthetic automaticity, I guess.  As a result, since it is hard to teach an old dog comme moi new tricks, might as well leave it to word to replace all them "two spaces" at the very end to save me from an internal space war. 8-O lol


APA Style
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/06/apa-style-who-we-are.html
http://spacewaste.wordpress.com/

Chicago Style

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch06/ch06_sec007.html

6.7Punctuation and space—one space or two?

In typeset matter, one space, not two, should be used between two sentences—whether the first ends in a period, a question mark, an exclamation point, or a closing quotation mark or parenthesis. By the same token, one space, not two, should follow a colon. When a particular design layout calls for more space between two elements—for example, between a figure number and a caption—the design should specify the exact amount of space (e.g., em space).