One of the easiest ways to spot if a book has been professionally copyedited or proofread is to look at the apostrophes and quotation marks. If a book has a mixture of smart and straight apostrophes, it’s quite likely that some shortcuts have been taken in its production. This post will help you to see why these inconsistencies matter, how to find them, and most importantly, how to fix them.
Note: People who speak different Englishes call them different things (speech marks, quotation marks, talking marks, quote marks, etc.), but for consistency’s sake here, I’m just going to try to stick to apostrophes and quotation marks or quotes.
Straight and smart quotes in the wild
Can you spot the difference?
You might not have noticed it the first time you read it, but some readers will pick up on the inconsistently styled apostrophe there. In the first sample, it’s a “straight” apostrophe, and in the second, it’s “curly” or “smart.” This also affects double quotation marks and becomes more obvious in serif fonts. Curly apostrophes and quotes are called “smart” quotes because they automatically point in the direction they’re supposed to … most of the time.
What causes straight quotes to appear in my text?
Straight quotes usually crop up when you copy and paste text into the document from somewhere other than Word, such as if you’re using software like Scrivener, Grammarly, or ProWritingAid. They might also come up during structural edits, if you’re working in Google Docs or another word processing program. They’re incredibly common and easily fixed, so don’t panic!
How to fix straight or curly quotes
Fixing them is one of the first steps in my editing process. Now, most manuscripts of about 50 000 words might have thousands and thousands of them. I certainly don’t fix them one by one! I use Replace All to flip all the apostrophes and quotation marks over to smart quotes. To do it yourself, you’ll need to make sure this box is checked in the autocorrect settings:
Once that’s done, use Find and Replace to easily fix the incorrectly used straight and smart quotes. You simply put an apostrophe in both the “Find what” and “Replace with” fields, and let Word’s “Autocorrect as you type” options work its magic. Repeat the process for double quotation marks (find “ and replace “).
Possible pitfalls
My work’s not done! The global replacement of straight apostrophes and quotation marks may have caused some more problems that are specific to fiction. For example, your characters might use more casual speech, such as “Let’s get ’em!”
The Find and Replace you just did will result in this:
Word’s Autocorrect is a little silly; it assumes that every apostrophe at the beginning of a word is a single open quotation mark, as you might see in UK fiction, or in nested quotes within double quotation marks, like this: “And I said to her, ‘That’s not a comma, it’s an apostrophe!’” So, Word flips the smart quotes the wrong way round.
This is a prime example of why it is so important to hire a human proofreader to go over your text; humans are not perfect, but robots make mistakes too.
Fixing reversed apostrophes is easy, though a little more fiddly, but luckily there are not as many of them. I usually flip them the other way as I work through the text by typing a second apostrophe to the right of the broken one, and then deleting the one that’s backward.
Why does it matter?
This is one of many silent changes I make as I work through a manuscript. Corrections like these, where you’re fixing something that is objectively messy and inconsistent rather than something that’s subjective or a style choice, result in a more polished and professional manuscript. Little tricks like these ones help make my editing more efficient so I can spend more time focusing on the bigger things that matter, like the character that was drinking coffee two pages ago but is now drinking tea, or a week full of Thursdays.
If you skipped this step and a reader notices, they might wonder which other corners were cut, and they may doubt whether they spent their money wisely on your book. Taking the time to clean up these little problems does wonders for building a reader’s trust in you so they keep coming back for more.
But it’s boring and tedious and I just wrote a whole book and I don’t want to go through it all over again to find silly little details like this that don’t matter all that much to me personally…
– Anonymous author
The easiest solution for the busy author is:
