Comments on: Apostrophe Atrophy

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:15:39 +0000

I just can’t help but comment on the irony here: Jeremy Sutton’s comment about how simple switching to smart quotes is is full of instances of a lower-case a with a circumflex, followed by a Euro sign and a third character that is either an oe ligature, a trademark sign, or a boxy thing representing unknown character not available in this font, where it seems was intended one or the other sort of inverted comma. All other comments show up fine.

Things get a lot more “complex” when you have to check to see if your intended reader has the correct encoding. Personally, I’ll take the dumb quotes any day, heck at this point I’d rather review a contract entirely in unantialiased 9-point Comic Sans if the alternative was to put up with more smartquote misformatting garbage on my screen every time I had to look at a defined term.

By: Jeremy Sutton

Jeremy Sutton — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:57:28 +0000

Thank you, Chris, for highlighting this! A wonderful book that I recommend to everyone is â€œThe Mac is not a typewriterâ€ (and there is a PC version too) by Robin Williams (author, not actor):
http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312
Cheryl raises an excellent point about about how smart apostrophes so easily become dumb ones and at the same time straight inches become curly quotation marks when you donâ€™t want them to. Part of the culprit is Microsoft Wordâ€™s default settings. To correct this situation in Word go to Format > AutoFormat, click on Options and go through each tab (AutoCorrect, AutoFormat as you type and AutoFormat) unchecking the Replace \Straight quotes\ with â€œSmart Quotesâ€. This allows you to use straight inches and feet symbols and when you hold down the Option/Alt key while clicking on the curly bracket keys you get all the smart quotes you need (Shift reverses the directions). I know that all sounds complex but once you get in the habit it really isnâ€™t! Good luck:-)

By: Anne

Anne — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:24:26 +0000

I agree with Florida that this is some highly specialized stuff, but for those of us who have actually had to convert all of the quotation marks and apostrophes in pages and pages of printed material, it is very relatable. I was also a copy editor for three local newspapers, and anytime I would import anything from a Word document, I would get dumb quotes. (Thank you MS!) My boss there called them “hash marks” and would correct my copy editing by just writing “hash” on the dummies. Ugh – I do not miss that…

By: Case

Case — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:43:25 +0000

And yet you accept the smart quotes around The “Wire” when the title of the show is “The Wire”. They don’t look like very smart quotes to me.

By: the creature

the creature — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:26:49 +0000

oooooooooooooohhh.

i see it now.

By: Sara

Sara — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:49:51 +0000

A little off-topic, but I found a sign right down the road from me posted on that Signs of Life blog. There must be a kindred spirit nearby…

By: Florida

Florida — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:33:58 +0000

Wow, this is too OCD for my taste.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:21:13 +0000

I fought these for four years as a proofreader. I proofed pages of catalogs for companies that sold sports equipment, and I would see this all the time, but just the opposite. We used a lot of inch and foot marks on the pages, and it would drive me nuts to see smart quotes instead of inch marks, the latter of which are straight. I painstakingly went through all of our pages and carefully replaced all the smart quotes every time. Quark, the old publishing application, automatically imported them as smart quotes. So annoying.

Inexplicably, the straight-up-and-down ones always ended up in the copy body in place of apostrophes. I was so close to going all proofreader on Quark’s ass.

By: Higgins

Higgins — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:51:27 +0000

Okay, I’ve added a little explanation right below the image.

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:45:36 +0000

Like the creature, I’m stumped. I’m confused by this whole post, and I don’t see what’s wrong with the image shown. Can you explain?