Why are people , many people , some of whom say they have advanced degrees ( for example PHDs ) adding spaces everywhere ? Is it a thing now ?

[MrsTerryPratchett]

Just why ?

Sorry. I don’t understand. Spaces where?

As in the title. Before and after punctuation.

My phone does it and sometimes I miss going back and correcting it. See also not putting a capital letter at the start of a paragraph.

see?

I've noticed before that my phone auto-deletes ( if I put a letter next to it. I assume mine isn't the only one so people have got into the habit of leaving a space?

Never happened to me with? or ! though...

Oh OK. I add a space after punctuation, was taught to do so in typewriting classes & never stopped 😂.

Before - no idea.

This drives me bonkers.

After is good. Before isn’t.

As @Tinkerbellthefairysays, maybe it’s people’s phones.

I have to tweet for work. My work iPad double spaces everything as I tweet, my phone doesn’t. I don’t know why or how to change it. Haven’t given it much thought to be honest but it does get on my nerves,

Why ?

We’re in Pedants’ Corner. Read the room.

It was a joke. Read the room.

I find it annoying too. Never a space before.

This is Pedants’ corner.

PhD is the usual abbreviation, not PHD.

Happy Christmas. 🎄

It's phones.

I make hundreds of mistakes, both spelling and punctuation, that I'd never make handwriting - which is how I was taught for most of my education.

It is so easy to hit the wrong key, including the space bar, and you tend to see what you intended to write, not what actually got thumped out.

My prep school teachers would be in tears if they saw my posts, texts and emails.

I’m old and when typing on my phone or laptop, I punctuate as I was taught on Pitman typing courses decades ago.

Spaces were one after a comma, colon or semicolon, two after a full stop. Mobile phones don’t necessarily follow Pitman rules!

Improper use of apostrophes annoys me far more than inconsistent use of spaces.

Yuo.

My phone and I live in a constant battle of not understanding each other. It's like a dreadful marriage.

It isn't helped by the fact that things are different distances apart on different devices so if you type really fast, all sorts of rubbish gets typed out. I find MN really bad because I look at MN as micro breaks between work tasks, eg completing an email, sorting out a paragraph. It tends to mean I don't really have time to be responding, so I rush.

Case in point, the It's in the paragraph before the one directly above ended up with a semi-colon in place of an apostrophe. Sometimes you just miss hitting the correct key, and truthfully, sometimes the battle just gets to be too much .

My French colleague always has spaces before ? and ! - my phone does it if I switch the keyboard to French.

I do it at times because if I do two spaces I get a full stop like this. But other times I forget and I want a question mark so I do a space, remember that I’m needing a question mark and do the ? But it looks like this ?

see?

I'm afraid I fall prey to the apostrophe thing all the time - though never in handwriting!

I was never taught to type properly. I fell in that generation where it was considered too sexist to teach girls typing instead of Further Maths, but we didn't use laptops until the very end of school. Computers were all kept in "the computer room" and you spent about an hour a week in there making fun of the geeky IT guy. learning random things about floppy disks.

I learned to type on a manual typewriter with blank keys.

I use a space after a full stop, comma, and question mark because I prefer it.

However, I don't in Pedants' Corner! 😅

I have a PhD. I don't think I add unnecessary spaces but my SPAG is generally shit. I do know about my subject though!

Came on to say I was taught this way too. It seems I have been inadvertently driving people mad with this for years.

I had no idea it was only one space after a full stop. I had a typewriter as a child and my nan taught me to type, she was a secretary. I've been doing it wrong all my life. This is going to be a tough habit to break.

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/

Two spaces after a full stop is fine and is indeed the Proper Way (fellow typewriter-learner here).

MrsTP means why a space before/after other punctuation marks. And it sounds like it's device-related.