The inverted comma/speech mark key is bugging me!!

Gidday,

About 2 weeks ago I got my XPS 13. I've now started using it for university. I'm writing 4 essays at the moment and my inverted comma/speech mark key is annoying me. Whenever I press it or [+ shift] for the quote marks, neither of the characters appear until I press space (in which case it just makes it appear, it doesn't actually do a space) or press a letter key.
It's annoying because the word after the end of my quote never separates and stays as a single word with my quote. And obviously it isn't even a word.
I've tried searching Control Panel to see if its just the set up of the keyboard (although I can't imagine why; when you press a key, you want the character to appear).
Some might have already guessed that I'm pretty IT illiterate. So I may be missing something completely obvious.

Thanks for any help though!
Brad.