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Learn How to Use Quotation Marks in English

English curved quotes, also called “book quotes” or “curly quotes”, look like small figures six and nine with the counters filled. They are preferred in formal writing and printed typography. In e-mail and on Usenet they can only be used by using a MIME type with a character set outside of the ISO-8859 series such as a Unicode encoding or one of the Windows-125x series. Whilst not a problem for most modern mail clients this does increase the size of the message and makes the raw message text harder to follow and so some believe it is bad practice (in much the same way that some think that HTML e-mail is a bad thing). A few mail clients send curved quotes using the windows-1252 codes but mark the text as ISO-8859-1 causing problems for decoders that do not make the dubious assumption that C1 control codes in ISO-8859-1 text were meant to be windows-1252 printable characters.

Curved and straight quotes are also sometimes referred to as “smart quotes” and “dumb quotes” respectively; these names are in reference to the name of a function found in word processors like Microsoft Word that automatically converts straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes. This function is necessary because keyboards lack separate quotation marks, due to the fact the ASCII character set didn't have distinct opening and closing quotation marks. A quote followed by a letter generally becomes an opening quote, whereas a quote with a letter or period (full stop) preceding it and a space after it becomes a closing quote. This function is usually referred to as “educating quotes”.

Variants of ' and " are:

' - U+201B (HTML: ‛) – single high-reversed-9, or single reversed comma, quotation mark (This is sometimes used to show dropped sounds at the end of words, such as goin' instead of using goin', goin', goin`, or goin')

 - U+201F (HTML: ‟) – double high-reversed-9, or double reversed comma, quotation mark

Supporting curved quotes has been a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely-used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them (as discussed above).

Word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users, because in printed documents curved quotes are preferred to straight ones. Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system were using — but the character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, and ISO 8859-1 (typically the default character set for the Unices and Linux) had no curved quotes, making cross-platform compatibility a nightmare.

Compounding the problem is the “smart quotes” feature mentioned above, which some word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) use by default. With this feature turned on, users may not have realized that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something entirely different.

Unicode support has since become the norm for operating systems. Thus, in at least some cases, transferring content containing curved quotes (or any other non-ASCII characters) from a word processor to another application or platform has sometimes been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) are Unicode-aware. But there are many applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur.

There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can result in difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding. For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as “garbage”. HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes ‘ (left single), ’ (right single), ‚ (low 9 single), “ (left double) ” (right double) &dbquo; (low 9 double). XML does not define these by default, but specifications based on it can do so, and XHTML does. In addition, while the HTML 4, XHTML and XML specifications allow specifying numeric character references in either hexadecimal or decimal, SGML and older versions of HTML (and many old implementations) only support decimal references. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use “ and ”, and to represent single curly quotes use ‘ and ’. In HTML, it is safest to use the named entity references (“, etc.), although decimal numeric character references are processable by most web browsers (Netscape 4 being a notable exception).

There has been some argument in recent years about the appropriateness of book quotes, since they are perceived by some as distracting. Editors who are against book quotes generally argue for ASCII-style straight quotes.

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