erroneous space and removal of last character when phrase selected

For my longer phrases, IT has started erroneously placing a space after the first character of the phrase and then backspaces over the last character when I execute the phrase. The phrase entry is still correct, and I have tried to remove, then recreate the phrase with the same result. It may not seem like much, but I have to remove the random space in the first word and retype the last letter of the last word for these phrases every time now. Do you have any ideas as to why this is happening and how to fix it? I'm on a Win 7 machine, typing in MS Word.