When I worked in Scrivener and in Word, I had trouble with curly quotes. They look like this:
“curly quotation marks”
The default for most systems is the more modern straight quotes:
"straight quotation marks"
Most of my work is historical, and I use fonts that look a little more like printing or typeset, so I want curly.
In Word, there is a setting to do curly quotes, but it’s inside the settings for autocorrect.
Many of us find it doesn’t work. We set it but it still does straight quotes, and it doesn’t change straight quotes that are there anyway.. Sometimes a curly one jumps in. We don’t know why, and spend hours changing the quotation marks.
A simple trick: replace them all. I know it won’t look right, but select your whole book, then do Find and Replace with your double quotation marks.
I know it seems weird, since it looks like you’re replacing straight quotes with straight quotes. So:
- Use Word – Preferences – Autocorrect to set the curly quotes
- Use Edit – Find – Replace and put double quotes in both
Caveat: For single quotation marks, this doesn’t work as easily, and with good reason. Sometimes we use a closing mark (’) for contractions, apostrophes, or even leaving off letters at the beginning of a word:
My country ’tis of thee
That was Gretchen’s streudel
You don’t know who he is
Word can’t always tell the difference. So we do need to go back and look at all those individual (using Find can help, though!)