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Saturday, December 7, 2013

A US Copy Editor's Perspective: Use Curly Quotes; Use CLOSING Single-Quote Mark for Missing Letters at Beginning of a Word


Let me set the proper stage here. In publishing realms, the curly quote marks (smart quotes) are preferred over the straight quotes from every guideline I've seen directing authors' submissions or copy editor's rules, whether from CreateSpace or one of the bigger traditional publishing houses. Per 16CMS 6.112. I'll do another post soon on how an author can change those within the MSWord doc.

So there is the curly opening quote mark and then the curly closing quote mark (for both double quotes and single quotes, but we are dealing with the single quotes here for US applications), facing each other as a pair of parentheses does. This one gets overlooked too often, whether because of the lack of knowledge about this presentation or just because it takes a copy editor's eagle eye to discern it.

It's the same premise as to how contractions are formed. When you drop a letter, add in the closing single-quote mark to denote that missing element. Like cannot becomes can't, and do not becomes don't. Same principle. Same closing single-quote mark to use.

Whenever you drop off the first letter or two of a word, like using 'cause instead of the full word because, you use the closing single-quote mark in front of such words. Like 'em instead of them.

My blogger software seems to be using straight quotes as I draft this. I'll see what shows up in the preview and when I publish same. If it is still straight quotes, you'll have to use your imagination. Or maybe I can drop in some text from MSWord that will retain the curly quotes. Fingers crossed.

Here's a repeat of paragraphs three and four above, to test whether pasting from MSWord with the curly quotes in use, into a block quote here, ensures that my curly quotes get carried over into my blog post.

It’s the same premise as to how contractions are formed. When you drop a letter, add in the closing single-quote mark to denote that missing element. Like cannot becomes can’t, and do not becomes don’t. Same principle. Same closing single-quote mark to use.

Whenever you drop off the first letter or two of a word, like using ’cause instead of the full word because, you use the closing single-quote mark in front of such words. Like ’em instead of them.

Yes! That worked. There you go. This block quote above shows the curly quotes, which helps us copy editors do our job.

Denise Barker, author + blogger + copy editor
amazon.com/author/denisebarker

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