Straight and curly quotes Straight quotes are the two generic | TomBen’s Web Excursions

Straight and curly quotes

Straight quotes are the two generic ver­ti­cal quo­ta­tion marks lo­cated near the re­turn key: the straight sin­gle quote (') and the straight dou­ble quote (").

Curly quotes are the quo­ta­tion marks used in good ty­pog­ra­phy. There are four curly quote char­ac­ters: the open­ing sin­gle quote (‘), the clos­ing sin­gle quote (’), the open­ing dou­ble quote (“), and the clos­ing dou­ble quote (”).

Straight quotes are a type­writer habit. In tra­di­tional print­ing, all quo­ta­tion marks were curly. But type­writer char­ac­ter sets were lim­ited by me­chan­i­cal con­straints and phys­i­cal space. By re­plac­ing the curly open­ing and clos­ing quotes with am­bidex­trous straight quotes, two slots be­came avail­able for other characters.

Word proces­sors are not lim­ited in this way. You can al­ways get curly quotes. Com­pared to straight quotes, curly quotes are more leg­i­ble on the page and match the other char­ac­ters bet­ter. There­fore, straight quotes should never, ever ap­pear in your documents.

在英文论文中看见「直引号」我就头大，强迫症让我有种把它们改成「弯引号」的冲动，比如这一篇文章的 标题。 #标点符号