I’ve noticed more and more over the last year or so people using punctuation in what appears to be an incorrect manner. I’m not talking about missing an apostrophe or something but obvious, purposeful misuse where you leave a space between the end of your sentence and your punctuation mark. The most recent I’ve seen was this quote from another thread:
I’m not picking on gonzo because I’ve seen this dozens of times by dozens of people all over the place, not just here. My dad recently asked me to review an ebay item and he had this gap on every single piece of punctuation. I asked him why and he said it was to draw attention to the exclamation mark/question mark and I told him all it did was draw attention to his piss poor grammar and punctuation skills but I can tell he still wants to put that extra space between the word and the punctuation.
Is this proper usage that I’ve never been informed of or are people just developing weird writing habits?
Good to know. Every time I see it I go into a mental RAEG but then I stop myself because it could have been legitimate. Now I know that the rage is justified!
I’ve never known it to be acceptable. But I’ll sometimes do that if I’m writing something by hand. That’s more a penmanship issue than one of puctuation.
Is RAEG an acronym for Rant Against Egregious Gaps? Or just a typo? The widespread intolerance of minor punctuation breaches and accidental misspellings is one of the only unattractive things about the SDMB.
Yes, I’m aware that “Or just a typo?” is a sentence fragment.
It is a meme indicating extreme, face-stabbing rage. Totally normal, I promise! But the fact that things like RAEG have found their way into acceptable usage (or at least partially acceptable usage) made me wonder about the punctuation thing.
He’s right in thinking that will draw attention. Where he’s wrong is in presumably thinking that will somehow help him. In drawing attention it distracts from the message he’d really like to get across.
