Posted by Eugene Volokh: Against Double Spacing: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_22-2009_03_28.shtml#1238112172
Lots of people distribute drafts double-spaced (i.e., with a blank line between each line of text). Maybe it's just me, but that strikes me as suboptimal: 1. Double-spacing makes printouts bulkier, for those of us who still read longish articles on paper (especially when traveling). 2. Double-spacing wastes paper. 3. Single-spacing means more text on a page, so it's more likely that several related paragraphs will be kept together, so that one can return to the previous one if necessary with just one glance. 4. More text is of course not an unalloyed good; absence of white space can make the reader's eyes glaze over. But my sense is that the best place to put white space is in wider margins or possibly blank lines between paragraphs -- blank lines between each line don't help, either psychologically or for comprehension. 5. The one advantage of double spacing is that it makes it easier to make detailed line edits. But very few readers of your draft are likely to want to make detailed line edits. At most they'll want to leave a few notes to themselves, and the margins will likely more than suffice for that. In any case, that's my take -- is it unusual? Is there something I'm missing? _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
