Weekly Writers: Straight Quotes And Curly Quotes

Time to get bendy

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When typewriters (and therefore keyboards) were designed, they had one key for a single quote, and one for a double quote. The straight quote characters stamped onto the page were small vertical lines, whether they were the opening of a quotation, or the closing of it.

"What a joy!" 'I love tofu.'

However, published books have extra effort put in to make them attractive and readable. Hence we have curly quotes, where what looks like a tiny 66 opens a quotation, and a tiny 99 closes it. Well, that’s if you use double quotation marks for quotes. If you use singles, it is a 6 and a 9.

“Hi!” ‘Go away.’

Whether you use double quotation marks or single ones, then a quote within a quote uses the other type. So these are both correct:

“The axe murderer said ‘Chopity chop!’ as he chased me down the stairs.”

‘I love the way you say “cherry roulade” in that seductive voice of yours.’

I favour using double quotation marks as the default for speech, so they don’t get mixed up with apostrophes.

In general, software makes quotes curly via a smartquote or autoreplace system. It tries to guess from the context if it is an opening or closing quote, or an apostrophe. Although often right, it can also get it wrong, since there is no set of automated rules that govern every situation. I’ll discuss why that is in a digression below.