Ben Borgers

Fancy Quotation Marks

February 12, 2022

Thereā€™s three different types of double and single quotation marks.

Hereā€™s an image, for your viewing pleasure:

Behold.

The first is a straight quote, and the next two are curly quotes (or slanted quotes, or ā€œfancyā€ quotes).

Youā€™re technically supposed to use the second two of each line ā€”Ā the middle one to start a quote, and the last one to end it.

This is a detail that I never paid attention to for years. But last year, I got harmlessly interested in what it would take to change them. After all, it does look a bit better if the quotes on either side of a phrase are slanted in the right direction.

I learned the keyboard shortcut for typing each type of slanted quote, and since then itā€™s been engrained into my brain.

The shortcut for getting these nice quotes to happen automatically is going to your browser (on a Mac), and then in the topmost menu bar turning on Edit > Substitutions > Smart Quotes. That seems to work in 90% of situations when youā€™re writing on the web.

But the rest? I manually do it. I manually make sure that the quotes are going the right way. Even when Iā€™m writing comments in code. At this point, itā€™s compulsive.

Itā€™s one of those things that you canā€™t un-see once youā€™ve started. And for whatever reason, my brain doesnā€™t let me type non-curly quotes anymore.

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