em dash overlaps

[dpluta]

I unknowingly must have hit a series of shortcut keys that is causing my em
dashes and ellipses (and possibly other characters I haven't discovered yet),
to not take up space when typed ... in other words, everytime I use an em
dash or ellipsis, the characters show up but Word does not seem to recognize
that there is something typed there and it winds up overlapping the type next
to it ... I checked character spacing and kerning ... I searched the help
screens ... I can't find any information on how to undo or control that ...
help!