Docs tower · floor

How to double space in Word, and why it still looks wrong

The mechanical answer to how to double space in word is two clicks, and Microsoft publishes it. It is on this page below. But most people asking are doing it because an assignment or a submission requires double spacing — and that is a different requirement from the one the button satisfies.

Note that those are two different tools for two different jobs, which is the first thing most pages about this blur. The Design route sets the whole document; the Home route changes only what you have selected. If you have used the second on a whole document by selecting everything, you have done something subtly different from the first.

Now the part that decides whether your document is actually correct.

Why Word behaves this way. The space-after-paragraph default is a good one for most documents — letters, reports, anything read on a screen — because it separates paragraphs visually without an empty line. Academic styles want the opposite: uniform spacing throughout, with the paragraph break shown by an indent rather than by a gap. Neither is wrong; they are conventions for different purposes, and Word’s default is the wrong one for a paper.

The other place it goes wrong is the reference list. APA is specific that double spacing applies to the reference list too, “including between and within entries”. A bibliography pasted from a citation generator frequently arrives with its own spacing, and it will not match the rest of your document unless you set it deliberately.

And blank lines are not spacing. Pressing Return twice between paragraphs produces something that looks roughly double-spaced and is not — it is single spacing with empty paragraphs in it. It breaks the moment anybody changes the font size, it confuses automatic contents pages, and it is visible to anybody who turns on formatting marks. If your document was made that way, the fix is to remove the empty paragraphs first and then set the spacing properly.

If you are not using Word. The same distinction exists everywhere: line spacing and paragraph spacing are separate settings in Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice, and the same trap applies in each — setting one does not zero the other. The floors below cover the free options and what they do and do not carry over when a file moves between them.

Before you submit anything. Check the brief for the style it names, then check the three fields above. If the brief says APA, the requirement is quoted on this page in the style body’s own words. If it says something else, the same check applies — the numbers may differ but the trap does not, because it comes from Word’s defaults rather than from any style guide.

The two routes are quoted from Microsoft’s own support documentation and the spacing requirement from APA Style, each read on 21 August 2026. The check in the red box and the point about blank lines are ours.

What this tower will not do

It will not stop at the two clicks. They are the easy half, and the half that leaves documents failing a requirement they appear to meet.

It will not tell you to press Return twice. That produces empty paragraphs rather than spacing, and it breaks the moment anything else changes.

And it will not invent a rule for a style it has not read. The APA requirement here is quoted from APA; if your brief names a different style, that style’s own site is the place to check. What holds instead is simple: the two routes are quoted from Microsoft’s support documentation and the spacing requirement from APA Style, each with the date it was read.