why do some people put a space before a question mark or exclamation point?
from jaiden@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 06 Jun 20:03
https://sh.itjust.works/post/39618982
from jaiden@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 06 Jun 20:03
https://sh.itjust.works/post/39618982
i fixed the question. for people who do so, is it because your native language does so, like french? or is it because of stylistic choice?
like “hello ! how are you ?” i know a polish speaker who does that
#nostupidquestions
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And some people don’t use a space at all!They type like this.Argh.
Or they use commas instead of full stops for ellipses,
oh my gosh, i’ve seen that!! i wonder why 🤔
I have fought the urge to do that many times. For me, it feels a bit softer than the ellipses. But i try to restrain myself lol
Apparently there was some school of teaching for a while, where the teachers were emphasizing getting your ideas down on paper quickly, without regard for spelling, spacing, paragraph-ing, punctuation, verb tense, etc. I ran across it when I was trying to find out why there was this generation of fanfic writers who had interesting concepts but couldn't write to any kind of standard - and who were extremely resistant to any suggestions. Some of the concepts sounded really interesting, too, but it was entirely too much work to try to parse the story.
The reason i sometimes do it is because my brain sees a typed word as ending with a space in principle. Even if it the only word i’m typing. I doubt i managed to make sense, but anyways.
i think i get it, thanks!
For me, it’s that my keyboard sometimes autocorrects to French.
ohhh
I have never seen anyone put a space before a question mark! I’m curious to find out now too lol
i think it's common with younger generations, especially when texting !!
Good question, does anyone know ?
Smartphone keyboards are multilingual now. I can set it to French and autocorrect in English. But if there’s a bug, it may be confused I guess.
mine autocorrects to german sometimes. I don’t even speak german
Unglaublich !
Uhm !
Your joke was not detected by everyone. Not taken as a joke, the comment is useless !
I noticed !
i notice, sorry to not respond ! i have no idea why people type that way ? 🤔
Maybe for the same reason so many people do not capitalize the first word in their sentences.
i do this when writing in a hurry on my phone
The rules of where to make spaces variate in different languages, so maybe some people do as they learned in their native language.
ahhh
Not stylistic, it’s the language.
I don’t mean french, i mean in english
When texting (ie, fast reading and writing), I'll occasionally do it for legibility when using exclamation points, when the sentence I'm writing ends in too many thin, upright letters. Like in a text, I think
I will !
reads faster than
I will!
It was the standard English printed style in the US and UK from the 1860s until the early 20th century, gradually phasing out by the 1950s.
For printers with variable spaces, it was typical to use a hair space before the punctuation and an em space after.
For more details, see this article on the history of sentence spacing.
It is the orthographic norm for some languages, i.e. the only correct way to spell.
French is like that. Any double punctuation symbol gets a space beforehand.
that makes sense, it’s why i wonder if most people who do that are french speakers
Many probably are, I don’t know about “most”. There are plenty of people who just don’t know proper typography without that having this kind of explanation.
I think the point virgule depends if you’re from France or Québec. I learned it with no space before it and seems this table confirms that. This similar one from a Quebec source seems to be saying you can do either.
i do this when the word(s) before the punctuation should be easy to copy+paste, like “did you install figlet ?” so they don’t accidentally get the question mark into the copied text
English isn’t their first language usually
second language or typo
Stylistic choice to make it more visible (in most cases).
FTFY
Just yell!!!
I only do it when my thumb accidentally hits spacebar instead of the period button right next to it, and I don’t care enough to go back and fix it.