Re: Thanks! (was Re: Possessive form of name ending with apostrophe?)

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Re: Thanks! (was Re: Possessive form of name ending with apostrophe?)

Subject: Re: Thanks! (was Re: Possessive form of name ending with apostrophe?)
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 12:45:53 -0500

On Sat, 07 Mar 2015 11:58:39 -0500, Kate Schneider <kateschneider42 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

For some visual separation, rather than using a double apostrophe, could
the student try using a single straight quote (or a prime or whatever the
opposite of a grave accent is; I'm sure both of these options are in the
character map), followed by the curly apostrophe? It might not be
technically correct, but it would be a little easier to distinguish that it isn't a misplaced closed quotation mark.

There is yet an additional problem if the doubled quotation mark is to be accepted as the "correct" punctuation. Copy that is submitted for publication as "typographically perfect" might get further corrections added. In the old days it was the Linotype operator (or the hand-set compositor) who was the final judge of what was to appear in print. Certain words might be omitted, or punctuation changed, to match his sensibilities, or even to fit to a page.

Now it will be some "autocorrect" function that changes '' to " or to ' or perhaps to '". The author will not see the result until it is in print or in some pre-built PDF. (These difficulties hound any author who is trying to write a newspaper or magazine article on bad spelling and bad punctuation, because illustrations of non-standard usage get mis-corrected.

If using separate kinds of quote marks fails to avoid the problem, one other possible solution might be to code [quote][quote] as [quote][thin-space][quote] so that auto-correction software won't notice the "error".
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