Curly quote edition

Dear editors,

Yesterday, the publishing team announced that Chorus will now automatically convert straight quotation and apostrophe marks to curly ones when you paste in text from another source.

This is very exciting news! I’m especially thrilled about Chorus automatically making straight apostrophes curly, because those are particularly tedious to spot.

So what’s the deal with curly quotes, anyway? In traditional printing, all quotation marks were curly. But when typewriters came into existence, straight quotes became prevalent because they saved space on keyboards. Along with double spaces after sentences and multiple hyphens used in place of dashes — like so — they’re a bad typewriter habit.

Curly quotes are a feature of good typography; they help with readability. And since the world is no longer constrained by keyboard typewriters, they’re standard style for most websites.

One important note: Keep watching out for apostrophes used to contract words or years, like ’90s and ’tis. You’ll need to manually change these apostrophes so that they’re facing the right way. To make an apostrophe that faces backwards, you can either:

— Press Option + Shift + ] on a Mac

or

— Type an apostrophe after a word or letter (which will make it automatically curl the right way) and then copy and paste it before your year or abbreviated word. The result will look like this:

An example of what not to do:

For further reading on curly/smart quotes, visit this website by former Vox Media designer Jason Santa Maria.

Copy News

Some recent additions to our word lists: ax (not axe), ax-throwing bar, cornbread, king cake, mandu (not mandoo), fit-fit, injera, new American cuisine, takedown, fattoush, car crash (not car accident), net neutrality, and friends and family sale.

The top grammar and writing errors of 2017, as determined by a report that surveyed 3 million U.S. students in grades 5 through 12. A roundup of the words of the year according to various dictionaries. And a story on JSTOR about how word processing tools are “just as influential as the mason’s choice of a particular compass or square.”

Have a great week!

Emma