straight and curly quotes Always 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 ( ” ).

Win­dows To use the alt codes, hold down the alt key and type the four-digit char­ac­ter code on your nu­meric key­pad (num lock must be activated). Mac OS Where mul­ti­ple keys are listed, type them simultaneously.

Windows Mac OS HTML ' straight single quote ' ' ' " straight double quote " " " ‘ opening single quote alt 0145 option + ] ‘ ’ closing single quote alt 0146 option + shift + ] ’ “ opening double quote alt 0147 option + [ “ ” closing double quote alt 0148 option + shift + [ ”

Most bad habits en­demic to dig­i­tal ty­pog­ra­phy are for­mer type­writer habits. They arose from ne­ces­sity, not be­cause any­one liked them. Af­ter all, were type­writ­ers ever used to type­set books, mag­a­zines, or news­pa­pers? Nope.

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

See foot and inch marks for the one ex­cep­tion to this rule.

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 Word File → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options → AutoFormat As You Type → check or uncheck "Straight Quotes" with “ Smart Quotes” Mac OS Word Word → Preferences → AutoCorrect → AutoFormat As You Type → check or uncheck "Straight Quotation Marks" with “ Smart Quotation Marks” Pages Edit → Substitutions → check or uncheck Smart Quotes

Smart-quote sub­sti­tu­tion has been built into word proces­sors for nearly 30 years. That’s why straight quotes are one of the most griev­ous and in­ept ty­po­graphic errors.

When you paste or im­port text with straight quotes in it, your word proces­sor may not al­ways con­vert the straight quotes prop­erly. Fix them.

One caveat: if you’ve cor­rected any apos­tro­phes that ap­pear at the start of a word ( Patent ’211 , ’70s rock ), this tip will goof them up again. So fix the quotes first, then the apostrophes.

How to convert all quotes to curly quotes 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 ( ' ). 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.

You can also en­ter curly quotes into HTML doc­u­ments us­ing the key short­cuts above. They’re non-ASCII glyphs, how­ever, so you need to spec­ify a non-ASCII en­cod­ing for the file (like UTF‑8), oth­er­wise they’ll get gar­bled on decode.

HTML & CSS have no au­to­matic fa­cil­ity for con­vert­ing straight quotes to curly. But in­sert­ing these char­ac­ters us­ing HTML es­cape codes is dreary.

If you use a CMS like Word­Press, plu­g­ins are avail­able that han­dle this au­to­mat­i­cally. There are also Java­Script-based con­vert­ers that work in the browser. If you’re tempted to write your own straight-to-curly con­verter, re­con­sider—the good ones cover tricky edge cases that you’re apt to miss on your own.

An­other op­tion is to use the lit­tle-known q tag, which au­to­mat­i­cally ap­pends curly quotes to the en­closed el­e­ments. So <q>Hello</q> ren­ders as Hello . Two caveats. First, a par­ent el­e­ment (like html ) must have a lang at­tribute (like lang="en" ) so the q tag knows what kind of curly quotes to use. Sec­ond, this change in markup re­moves the quote marks from the char­ac­ter stream, and doesn’t help with apos­tro­phes, so it may be a long drive for a short day at the beach.