Grammar Girl here, today's podcast is a little different from what I normally do.

If you're a new listener, welcome.

I usually talk about things like cereal commas and who versus whom, but today we're going

to investigate a writing mystery.

You see, I've received a couple of messages now from people wanting to know why they're

suddenly seeing spaces between the end of a word and punctuation.

I'm not talking about how many spaces to put after a period at the end of a sentence.

I covered that back in episode 181.

I'm talking about people putting a space between the end of a sentence and the final

period as a glommation point or question mark.

I hadn't seen it myself, and although I know it's wrong, I didn't know why people had started

doing it.

It was a mystery, so I posted the question on the Grammar Girl Facebook page and got

some interesting answers.

The first explanation offered by many readers is that a space is required before some punctuation

marks in French.

And after investigating, I was surprised to find that it's true.

At the end of a sentence, French writers put a space before finishing with a question

mark or an exclamation point.

According to the about.com page on French punctuation, French requires a space before any two-part

punctuation mark.

You'd also need a space before a semicolon, a colon, and the French equivalent of quotation

...