Why are more people putting spaces before punctuation when typing?

[dmell13]

Has anyone else seen a lot of people's typing/texting like this with a space before the punctuation? I'm seeing it more and more and don't know where its come from?

e.g. Ok , i'll meet you in town on Saturday . 😧
Why ?

It's been prevalent for a while - I have no idea why people do it though!

Because if you start typing and a word appears in the auto complete line and you select from there, it frequently automatically puts a space after it. You have to remove the space if you don't want it there at the end of a sentence. Sometimes, people cannot be bothered.

I am curious about this too 🤔

THIS - although yes it is gramatically incorrect.

Without wishing to be 'that' person', but since you have posted in Pedants' corner... people is plural, so "people's typing/texting" could more elegantly replaced with "people typing/texting" without altering the meaning of the sentence. And of course "where its come from?" would also benefit from an apostrophe :)

I imagine the error you have pointed out results from a combination of ignorance, fat fingers on a 'phone screen keypad and the unchecked use of predictive text and/or autocorrect.

Yes, it's probably because of this lack of correct programming in autocorrect. How hard is 'maybe put in a space to be helpful, but take it out again if the next character is punctuation?' But autocorrect, like much of IT, is shit. Imagine if I made a sale at work, but missed off the VAT? How shit would that be? Yet its programmers failed to configure autocorrect so it can tell the difference between a word space and the end of a sentence. If I was that shit at my job, I'd get fired.

Grammatically 😗

I don't get hung up about spacing and grammar in text messages. Mostly, I am too busy being irritated by my phone keyboard switching to German format and having to completely rewrite things into English.

My phone often puts spaces in random places. I try and take them all out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed one occasionally!

Possessive pronoun before the gerund. 😊
My Mother was an English teacher, and used to call this out so many times.

I love Pedants’ Corner as the posts are almost always riddled with errors.

It’s just autocorrect OP. Most people are texting to communicate casually and quickly and don’t give a shit about a space before a comma.

To be honest, I miss the old days of T9 texting when everyone got creative with abbreviations and text speak. It had more character ;-)

I’m 70 and have been doing this for ! and ? for about 50 years so nothing to do with auto correct, texts, phones etc. I don’t know why but I do it but I think it makes it clearer, especially for a ! Apologies if I offend but does it really matter ?

I also double space between sentences; will I go to Hell ?

*Pedants' corner

Ah, the long-running debate as to whether it's Pedant's or Pedants' Corner!

I think @BrickBiscuit was questioning the use of Corner not corner ;)

I'm not so sure it's all down to auto correct. It has been a pet peeve of mine for years, if not decades. Back before auto-correct, people used to do it when using typewriters and then word processors in the 80s and 90s. I think some people just assume there has to be a space. Proper touch typists never did it as they were taught not to, but it was certainly very common amongst people who typed (typewriters or word processors) on an occasional/ad hoc basis.

I've also seen a fair few people write hand written letters and leave a space before punctuation, but it's not as obvious with hand-writing.

I think, to some extent, it shows who are avid readers and who aren't, as if you read a lot, you'll just "see" that there's no space before punctuation, whether books, newspapers, or whatever, so instinctively you won't put spaces in when you're writing.

Corner or corner? 😂 Bonkers.

My phone does crazy shit when I'm typing, Ive stopped worrying g about it.

The best approach!

I do this in messages. It's purely an accident and I can't always be bothered to go back and correct it.

Oh I thought it was another AI give away like the em dash.

While this subject is on the go, and akin to what @grumpygrape said, I knew a person who did spaces between the end of a sentence and a question mark or exclamation point. He went to a very posh school and then on to Oxbridge, so I assumed this was some higher level stuff. I never adopted this (I'm poorly educated and what little I "know" picked up from literature and seeing what other people do), but I noticed it and wondered about it.

Oh dear. There’s a rogue apostrophe after ‘that’ in your first phrase. There is also a ‘be’ missing later in the same sentence, not to mention that missing capital letter in ‘Corner’. In addition I would be inclined to close the space between ‘apostrophe’ and that little collection of symbols representing a smiley face, although that’s personal preference.

With regard to the OP, I believe it’s the old auto carrot, especially when you alter something. It happens to me quite often when I’m typing a document. I might not notice in a text, especially if I’m in a hurry, but I’ve probably done it loads of times.

Haha, mea culpa. Though, to be fair, since this area of Mumsnet is clealy titled Pedants' corner with a lower case 'c', straight back at you ;)

So each word at the end of every sentence, is selected from autocomplete?

But you'd never see that in any printed material - newspaper, magazine, book or online article. Therefore if can't be right! It suggests an affectation (or ignorance?) on behalf of that person.