In traditional typing classes on a physical typewriter, students were taught to press the spacebar twice after a period to visually separate sentences. In the modern era of proportional digital fonts, this practice is obsolete; a single space is the universally accepted standard.
If you are an older typist who still uses double spaces, or if you are writing a specific piece of poetry or code where you intentionally inserted three or four spaces to align text, Microsoft Word’s grammar engine will violently reject your formatting. Word will automatically flag the extra spaces with a blue or green squiggly line, and if you have AutoFormat enabled, it may even automatically delete your extra spaces as you type.
To preserve your manual spacing, you must instruct the grammar checker to ignore the spacing between words and sentences.
How to Stop Word from Removing Extra Spaces
You need to adjust the specific grammar rules within the Word Options menu.
- Open your document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click on Options at the bottom of the left sidebar.
- Select Proofing from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Scroll down to the section labeled “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.”
- Click the Settings… button next to “Grammar & Refinements.”
- A complex list of grammar rules will appear. Scroll down until you find the Punctuation Conventions section.
- Look for the option labeled Space Between Sentences.
- Click the drop-down menu next to it and change the requirement from “One space” to Don’t check.
- Look for the option labeled Spacing (or “Spaces between words”). Uncheck this box entirely to stop Word from flagging multiple spaces within a sentence.
- Click OK twice to save your settings.
Microsoft Word will immediately remove the blue squiggly lines from your double-spaced sentences and will no longer attempt to automatically delete the extra whitespace you manually created.