by Sentenceworks
Spacing
Spaces Before Punctuation
Commas, periods, colons, semi-colons, exclamation marks, question marks, hyphens, ellipses, closing quotation marks and closing brackets do not need spaces in front of them. A space should be used before dashes, opening quotation marks and opening brackets. Apostrophes may have a space before them if they represent a missing letter (or group of letters) at the beginning of a word.
Incorrect: Where have you been ? I ’ve been waiting for over an hour ! “Five o’clock , ” you said . It ’s 6 :30 !
None of these punctuation marks require a space in front of them, except the opening quotation mark (“Five o’clock).
Correct: I (not knowing where I was going) purchased a nice-looking map – anything to get me out of the endless loop of suburbia.
A space is required before the opening bracket, but not before the closing bracket. The hyphen in nice-looking does not require a space in front of it, but the dash between map and anything does require a space.
Correct: I didn’t clean my room ‘cause I was busy watching TV.
The space in front of the apostrophe in ‘cause is required because the apostrophe represents the missing be; the space before the apostrophe is separating the two words, room and ‘cause.