Quotations are your friend

[amalthia]

I just ran across a story that used apostrophes in the place of quotations. I'm still rather sure that in 99% of the cases quotations are required at the beginning of dialogue and at the end of the dialogue. It's not even something that's easy to fix because you can't just replace all the quotations with apostrophes without messing up the apostrophes in the story. grrrr

I'm normally not a grammar nazi but in this case I'll make an exception. It's ugly formatting and not proper writing!

EDIT: it appears that this type of formatting is common in the UK. I didn't know that, but I do still prefer regular quotes so you don't get sentences that look like this.

(random sentence that I modified)

'They do.' She slipped into the galley, moving soundless on little bare feet. 'I'm hungry.'

Comments

[auburn]

Hmm. You mean it was formatted like this:

'Daniel,' Sam exclaimed, proving she hadn't been listening when Jack said he was bring their mutual friend to dinner with them.

Because I've seen that in older books and from some Europeans. The double-quote " is only mandatory I think in US punctuation. I myself don't like it, but I can tolerate it. I loathe when someone leaves the punctuation outside the quotes though. Like "Hello".
Arrrgh.

[auburn]

Or did you mean they used a font where the apostrophe and the quote are appreciably different and still used the apostrophe, because that is just wrong.

[amalthia]

for example this is how the sentence would read.

'They do.' She slipped into the galley, moving soundless on little bare feet. 'I'm hungry.'

People on my LJ are saying it's a UK thing? I didn't know that, but it just doesn't read right to me!

[derryderrydown]

It's fairly common in printed books but I've never seen it online. And I hate it with a passion.

[auburn]

Well, I said European, but yes, definitely a UK thing. Actually, if you think of the nomenclature you'll realize that this fashion is simply older: quotes predate double-quotes, probably in response to sans serif fonts.

You can get used to it. I've seen it from time to time, as I said, in fan fiction and published works too. I don't like it, either, but it isn't technically wrong, just rare. Or at least rare in US publishing and usage.

I went through and found replaced an entire fic over it once and boy was that a pain in the patootie.

[elf]

I've seen it online; it drives me buggy.

I've fixed it (in Word) with a several-step process:
1) Replace all " with something unique (@@, or QQQ, or %%)
2) Replace space-' with space-"
3) Replace .' with ."
4) Replace ?' with ?"
5) Replace !' with !"
6) Replace —' with —"
7) Replace -' with -"

Continue with other punctuation, if any. OR:
3) Replace '-space with "-space
4) Replace s" with s' (to fix the possessives)

This may still miss some, depending on how accurate the author is with punctuation. You may need to replace '. with ". and so on, and then run the s"-to-s' again. And it may still miss some, because some authors are whacked, but it'll only be a couple of isolated cases rather than every line of dialogue that drives you crazy.

After all that, remember to replace @@ with '.

[landshark]

See, punctuation outside of quotes is something I've always wondered about, and I never get a straight answer.

I tend to put it outside if whatever I'm quoting is a fragment inside a larger sentence, but inside for everything else.

[auburn]

No, no, no, no. It gives me hives. I don't care what they do in the UK or Outer Mongolia, the quotes are like HTML coding. Think brackets. They open and close the dialogue and must enclose punctuation related to the dialogue.

It should be like this:

Daniel poked his head in through the door, called out, "Hello, anyone home?" and when no one answered, backed out and decided to try again the next day.

Anything else looks and reads bizarre, and I am not, as our OP mentions, a real grammar nazi.

[auburn]

I have done this, where I really wanted to read, but the punctuation was driving me buggy. It's so much trouble, though you have it down to something of a science.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this though.

[amalthia]

oh wow thanks!

You know I think I may just follow these directions to the T! :) I'm not sure if this will work because the original story has zero " to replace with funny characters.

Edit: posted to the wrong comment.

[amalthia]

I tried that last night and it was a mess! I ended up deleting everything and figured I'd just get used to the single quotes! :)

[amalthia]

I think it must be quite rare for me to finally run across a story like this now. I think it's because I'm reading a lot of Merlin stories and so there are more UK authors participating. But I can see why the American's said fuck that shit! We're using double quotes! :)

[elf]

If you're certain there are no doublequotes, you can ignore those steps. They only show up when there are quotes-within-quotes; you just need a way to turn them to singlequotes at the end, if they do exist.

I'm sure there's some fancy regexp way to do this. And someday I may learn how to do that. In the meantime, I get a lot of mileage out of Word's find-and-replace functions.

[amalthia]

I think I messed up by using Word97 find and replace because for example when I typed in Find You"re Replace You're it changed all the you"re to You're. It was a mess! and I hadn't realized it had done that until far too late. Not sure why the program could not tell the difference between lower case and uppercase letters but I decided to just read the story as is.

[elf]

I believe there's a "match case" button somewhere. (There is in W2000; it's been a while since I dealt with W97, but everything else has a "match case" checkbox.) You'll need to do searches with both caps & noncaps, or just skip the first letter and search for ou"re.

[amalthia]

yeah, I realized that after the fact. :( 97 does have a match case, it just didn't occur to me to checkmark the box.

And I'd already spent about 1 hour on the file (yesterday evening) so I kind of just want to read the story now. :) But I think at some point I will revisit this.