Double Spacing, again, is so loose that it almost becomes more difficult to read, but this is the standard for lots and lots of academic papers. Our fourth choice is called Double Spacing, or 2.0. It's very open, very easy-to-read, but it's more often used for editing of a document that's already printed, than it would be for a document that was in final form. Rather than having space then for six lines to an inch, I will actually have space for only four. Another choice is what's called 1.5, or space-and-a-half. This slight increase, slightly over 1.0 of 1.15, makes my document easier to read in this font. But the trade-off is that all 70 of those pages will be far easier to read then they would be if I'd kept at default spacing of 1.0. For example, if I had a document the required 60 pages to print before, I'd now be using 70 sheets of paper to print that document. The move from 1.0, or single spacing, to 1.15, the new default, does take up a little more space in a printed document.

The first paragraph is clearly more compacted than the second paragraph, which is a looser kind of formatting.

The default spacing in previous versions of Word was single spacing, or 1.0, and when I choose the old default, you'll notice how this text is compacted and less easy to read. If we have a paragraph of text selected and we open the down arrow on the line spacing control, you can see what the spacing is for this paragraph. We will control line spacing with the line spacing control, here in the Paragraph group on the Home tab of the ribbon.

Line Spacing refers to the empty space between lines, and optionally the space between paragraphs in Microsoft Word documents.

Line and paragraph spacing in word 2010