PSA: ENGLISH IS NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. STOP PUNCTUATING IT LIKE ONE.

There should never be a space before a colon, semicolon, period, comma, exclamation point, question mark, or right parenthesis. EVER.

There should never be a space after a left parenthesis. EVER. 1/

In certain limited circumstances,* a hyphen may have a space before it or after, but never both. A hyphen is not a dash; learn the difference.

*for example, when there is an implied partial word on the space side, like this: "pre- and postlude."

2/

I can't think of a case when a slash should have a space on either side in English; don't do it. Certainly don't put spaces on BOTH sides of one, ever.

The backslash is not used in English punctuation. At all.

3/

Here's the one that's going to make some of you spit bullets: a comma or period at the end of a quote goes inside the quote, always (in American usage). All other marks go inside if they're part of the quote, outside otherwise.

This is not consistent. Get over it.

4/

It doesn't have to be consistent, because English is not designed to be read by a parser, but by a human brain.

One last thing: a mid-sentence ellipsis should not have a space on EITHER SIDE. And fuck you, whoever decided Google Keyboard should put one in automatically.

5/5