Understanding Curly and Straight Quotes

When you type quotation marks on your Mac you'll usually get curly quotes that curl correctly depending on what you are typing. Learn what curly quotes are, how they work, and how to use straight quotes instead if you like.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at typing quotation marks on your Mac. 
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When typing on your Mac keyboard things work pretty much as you would expect. If you type the letter a you get a lower case a. Shift and an and you get an uppercase A. But there is one key on your keyboard that could be different characters at different times. So let's say I want to use quotation marks to enclose a word. I use Shift and then the Quote key, which on American keyboards is just to the left of the Return key. You can see I get quotation marks. Then I'll type a word and then I'll use exactly the same key, Shift and then quotation marks again, but notice the character I get now looks different than the first time I used that key. I get curly quotation marks or curly quotes on the left and the right that curl in different directions. 
But then sometimes you might type quotation marks and get a third character. If I type it here and then a word in here, notice I get exactly the same set of double quotes on each side of the word. They are not curly. They're straight. So there are actually two different types of quotation marks. Curly and Straight. The curly one have a left and a right variation. The same thing happens for single quotes. So without the Shift key if I use the same key here and then I type, you can see I get straight single quotes. So these are called single quotes. The other ones are technically double quotes. But usually you would do a single quote like this and notice it is curly as well. Then you get its matching right side variation when you do it again. 
So when you get curly quotes like that it is usually because you have a feature on your Mac turned On called Smart Quotes. You can find this feature in many different places. For instance, there's a systemwide place where you can look. If you go to System Settings and then go to Keyboard and then go to Input Sources & Edit one of the options here is to use Smart Quotes and Dashes. Turn that On. Then you should get these curly quotes whenever you use the regular quotation mark key on your Keyboard in most apps. But a lot of apps, particularly ones where typing is the whole point, you've got an individual setting. So here in Pages I've got a setting here. If I look under AutoCorrection there's use Smart Quotes & Dashes. But there is also a setting here under Edit. If you go to Substitutions you'll see Smart Quotes there. 
So what's going on here is that this is a setting you can turn On and Off as you work on a document. But the setting here, that's the one that determines if the setting is On or Off when you start a new document. 
There are other apps that use these as well. For instance here in TextEdit under Edit, Substitutions, you can see Smart Quotes and you can turn it On or Off. Under TextEdit Settings there's also Smart Quotes right here and I can turn that On or Off. This would be what a new document starts with whereas the other one I can switch On or Off. 
Strangely in TextEdit, Smart Quotes is always Off when you're creating new plain text documents. But if you're creating Rich Text Documents it be that setting. Other Apple Apps have this as well. Even third party apps will have their own variation on this. If typing is the main point, for instance in Microsoft Word if I go to Word, Preferences and then go to Autocorrect and then look at Auto Format as you type, that is where you will find automatically as you type replace straight quotes with smart quotes. 
How does it know whether to use left or right when typing? Well, it is pretty simple. If there's nothing to the left of the quote then it will do a left curly quote. By nothing I mean white space. So, for instance, if I do this and just before I type the next work I use the double quotes it is going to curl them to the left because there is a white space over here. Then if I type something and then try to use double quotes again, if there is a letter to the left of it, it will use the right quote. 
Sometimes a single quote is actually an apostrophe. That's a completely different thing in grammar, of course, but it is the same character. Since there is a letter to the left when you're using an apostrophe you get the curly right single quote which makes sense. That's what you want to use. 
Now you may think, well that's great but why would you ever want to use straight quotes. I mean some people might like it as a style choice. But in general straight quotes are used when you're typing computer code. The internet is filled with pages that have computer code on them. There are tons of sites that just are for programmers. Even if you're not a programmer you may have, from time to time, typed a piece of html, css, or even Javascript code. When you do so you don't want to use curly quotes. You want to use straight quotes. Now you wouldn't normally be typing in Pages computer code. You'll be typing in a programming environment. Like Xcode for instance, and that environment would know to use straight quotes. But sometimes you're writing a blog post say online and it gives curly quotes where it is a piece of computer code and you want it to be straight quotes. Well that can be an issue. So you want to watch out for that because if somebody copies and pastes your code that has curly quotes in it into their programming environment it is not going to work. The programming environment wants straight quotes for computer code, not curly ones. 
Now you should also know that you could manually type curly quotes. So, in Pages here I'm going to go to Edit and Substitutions and turn Off Smart Quotes. So now if I type something it gives me straight quotes. So you can manually type curly quotes by using the Bracket Keys on your keyboard. So the ones with the curly and straight brackets on it. If you just type them plain you get a left square bracket. Use Shift you get a left curly bracket. But if you use Option then you get a curly double quote. Now you'd think the right bracket will give you the other side of that. In fact it is Option Shift and the left bracket that does the curly double quote. If you want the single quote it is Option right bracket and Option Shift right bracket. Likewise if you want to type a straight quote while you've got Smart Quotes turned On, you can hold the Control Key down.So using Control and the quote key will give you a straight single quote. Control and Shift and the quote key will give you the straight double quote. Of course support for that could technically vary from app to app.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Understanding Curly and Straight Quotes”

Indigo

7 months ago

Thank you, Gary. Great to finally get my head around what 'smart quotes' meant! By the way, any idea of the origin of quote marks having double or single elements?

Gary Rosenzweig

Indigo: "The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark)

Stephen Schulte

Excellent! Gary I continue to be amazed by the information you provide and your energy!! I thought I knew all about "smart quotes" -- but WOW I learned so much from your fact-packed and well-presented video! I did not realize that in Pages and TextEdit that we had these choices (curly vs. straight quotes). Thanks so much for this and so many other great MacMost videos!!!

Joe Woyciesjes

Very useful advice, but… You left something out of your video: Curly quotes and curly brackets are for use in writing. Straight quotes and brackets are meant for use in measurements and mathematics. For example double straight quotes mean inches, single quote indicates feet, etc. I know. After 45 years in tech writing, marketing communications, graphic arts and editing I’ve been corrected many times.

Joe: True, but isn't this rare nowadays? Would a 20-something know that 5' meant 5 feet? And outside of the U.S. of course it would be metric anyway.

V J Spindler III

I always learn so much from your tutorials. This time, I'm going to add something you forgot to mention. You will also need to use straight quotes when you want to refer to feet or inches: 6' 2"

Thomas Greenbank

Great, as usual, Gary. I had trouble for ages with getting curly quotes to work for me. As an author, they are essential, IMO. Many thanks.

Brian A. Foster

Two other issues to remember:
1) Use straight quotes when referring to feet and inches, such as 5' 11" (not 5’ 11”).
2) When abbreviating years, the apostrophe curls inwards as in “Election of ’24,” not “Election of ‘24.”

Understanding Curly and Straight Quotes

Comments: 8 Responses to “Understanding Curly and Straight Quotes”

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