some writers put a space between the end of their sentence and the question mark. this is thought to come from a french practice and is called french spacing. in french a space is always put before question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons. in english, however, using this space is thought of as bad form. some english books do have these spaces, but are often a very thin space, which are not full spaces but an attempt to make the words easier to read.