straight and curly quotesAlways use curly quotes

Straight quotes are the two generic ver­ti­cal quo­ta­tion marks lo­cated near the re­turn key: the straight sin­gle quote (') and the straight dou­ble quote (").

Curly quotes are the quo­ta­tion marks used in good ty­pog­ra­phy. There are four curly quote char­ac­ters: the open­ing sin­gle quote (‘), the clos­ing sin­gle quote (’), the open­ing dou­ble quote (“), and the clos­ing dou­ble quote (”).

WindowsMac OSHTML
'straight single quote'''
"straight double quote"""
‘opening single quotealt 0145option + ]‘
’closing single quotealt 0146option + shift + ]’
“opening double quotealt 0147option + [“
”closing double quotealt 0148option + shift + [”

Straight quotes are a type­writer habit. In tra­di­tional print­ing, all quo­ta­tion marks were curly. But type­writer char­ac­ter sets were lim­ited by me­chan­i­cal con­straints and phys­i­cal space. By re­plac­ing the curly open­ing and clos­ing quotes with am­bidex­trous straight quotes, two slots be­came avail­able for other characters.

Word proces­sors are not lim­ited in this way. You can al­ways get curly quotes. Com­pared to straight quotes, curly quotes are more leg­i­ble on the page and match the other char­ac­ters bet­ter. There­fore, straight quotes should never, ever ap­pear in your documents.

"That's a 'magic' shoe."wrong
“That’s a ‘magic’ shoe.”right

For­tu­nately, avoid­ing straight quotes is easy: use your word proces­sor’s smart-quote fea­ture, which will sub­sti­tute curly quotes au­to­mat­i­cally. Smart quotes are typ­i­cally turned on by default.

How to turn smart quotes on or off

WordFile → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options → AutoFormat As You Type → check or uncheck "Straight Quotes" with “Smart Quotes”

Mac OS WordWord → Preferences → AutoCorrect → AutoFormat As You Type → check or uncheck "Straight Quotation Marks" with “Smart Quotation Marks”

Word­Per­fectTools → QuickCorrect → SmartQuotes → check or uncheck Use double quotation marks as you type and Use single quotation marks as you type

Smart-quote sub­sti­tu­tion has been built into word proces­sors for 20 years. That’s why straight quotes are one of the most griev­ous and in­ept ty­po­graphic errors.

So why do I keep see­ing straight quotes in le­gal documents?

When you paste or im­port text with straight quotes in it —for in­stance, a de­po­si­tion tran­script or email— your word proces­sor may not al­ways con­vert the straight quotes prop­erly. Fix them.

How to convert all quotes to curly quotes

  1. Use the search-and-re­place func­tion to search for all in­stances of the straight sin­gle quote (') and re­place it with the same char­ac­ter—a straight sin­gle quote (').

  2. Use the search-and-re­place func­tion to search for all in­stances of the straight dou­ble quote (") and re­place it with the same char­ac­ter—a straight dou­ble quote (").

Be­fore you say “that won’t do any­thing”, try it. When your word proces­sor re­places each quo­ta­tion mark, it also per­forms the straight-to-curly conversion.

by the way

  • Straight quotes are ac­cept­able in emails. It’s hard to see the dif­fer­ence be­tween straight and curly quotes at small screen sizes.

  • Some doc­u­ments from on­line re­search ser­vices have dou­ble quotes made of two sin­gle quotes (' ') or two grave ac­cents (``). (The grave ac­cent, also some­times called a back­tick, is that char­ac­ter above the tab key you’ve never used.) These can be fixed by adapt­ing the search-and-re­place tech­nique de­scribed above.

  • Don’t use quo­ta­tion marks for em­pha­sis. Use bold or italic.

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