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How is a misuse of punctuation spacing perceived by native British and American people?

English Language & Usage Asked by MadWard on July 11, 2021

I am a Frenchie and an English enthusiast. In my language, we use spaces before quotation marks, exclamation marks, and colons.

While I’m aware that this is not the case in English, there are times when, having written in French before, I’ll forget about it and use a space before a quotation mark in an English sentence.

Thus: How would a native British/American person perceive my misuse of punctuation spacing, knowing that I’m not a native English-speaking person ?

Would it be something along the lines of "That guy can’t even space properly" or "Well, he’s an alien, we can’t blame him for that"?

More precisely, I’m asking this if I ever were to work in the UK or the US for the first time, and emailed my boss with such a "mistake".

2 Answers

I think that most of the English speakers would not notice to much. Since most of our written communication is typed, if they did notice they most likely would be wondering why the spell check did not catch the "error".

Answered by John S on July 11, 2021

Having come across this before, I'd barely notice it in an otherwise well-written email, especially someone whose name suggested that they weren't a native writer of English (yours may or may not do that IRL).

I've seen all sorts of punctuation errors from people for whom English is their first and only language, even in writing that's serious enough to be worth checking. The only time I would point it out (or care) is when proof reading it, perhaps as a co-author.

Answered by Chris H on July 11, 2021

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