Not unless we’re nonchalantly decorating a vintage clothing shop. The thing is, we don’t use typewriters anymore. You can check out Butterick’s Practical Typography for the longer story. One ambidextrous, repeatable (‘ + ‘ = “ or ”) key. At some point, someone decided that having four keys for ‘ ’ “ ” was a waste of precious keyboard space, so they ‘rationalised’ and replaced four keys with one: ‘. We learn this as children: quote marks look like a tiny 66 and 99 enclosing a section of speech, and an apostrophe acts like a little bracket, telling us where a letter has been omitted.īut once typewriters came onto the scene, the physical limitations of the hardware – the colliding alphabetical keys gave us today’s mixed-up QWERTY keyboard – really messed around with punctuation. In traditional handwritten typography and manual printing, apostrophes and quote marks were always curly. I want to say this wasn’t originally the case, but it was. ‘Straight’ apostrophes are wrong and ‘curly’ apostrophes (also known as directional, typographers’ or ‘smart’ apostrophes) are right, and that is that. I don’t mean an apostrophe missing from the word ‘they’re’, or one gatecrashing the plurals on a restaurant menu. There are two types of apostrophes: right and wrong. Call us superficial, but it really does matter. There’s ‘correct’ and then there’s ‘correct’. The best ones know that’s only half the job. A good proofreader knows how to use an apostrophe.
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