Writing, Self-Publishing, Book Marketing

When typing a manuscript in MS Word or other word-processing programs, do you sometimes add a space after an opening quotation mark because you don’t like how close it is to that first letter?  Have you ever noticed that sometimes the opening quotation mark then reverses itself, becoming a closing quotation mark, because of the program’s auto-formatting?  And you don’t understand why?  It’s that darn space.

Or those punctuation marks — like periods, question marks or exclamation points — when coming at the end of a line, and separated from their sentence by a space, are sometimes forced to the next line, alone and adrift?  It’s that space, again.

Or when inserting ellipses, you type in “. . .” and Word doesn’t auto-format the spaces and periods into a single character (…), that you’ll find one dot at the end of a line and two dots at the beginning of next?  It’s those spaces.

I am far from an expert on punctuation but encourage the authors out there to take a greater interest in the use of punctuation and how it’s typed into a Word document.  I found a plethora of online resources helping with punctuation rules, specifically APA rules, but here are a couple:
            http://www.docstyles.com/apacrib.htm
            http://www2.smumn.edu/deptpages/~tcwritingcenter/APA/APA_Punctuation.pdf

And, though she’s a British author and some of the rules detailed in the book may not be strictly applicable to US authors’ work, check out “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” by Lynne Truss, if only for the stickers that come with the book (a punctuation repair kit), including one that declares, “The panda says no!”