When to use ’em, and how to make ’em go the right way.

Sadly, most word processors don‘t know their it’s from a hole in the ground. Even expensive publishing software messes up. Why? Because they are not human. Being the human is your job.

An apostrophe is used to represent something that‘s missing. (Why not just type the missing thing? G‘won, you write that post.) Notice when I shorten it is mine to it‘s mine? The apostrophe tells the reader you spelled it weird on purpose by taking the place of the missing i. Wasn‘t, aren‘t, even my favorite ain‘t, have missing letters (o, in all three cases) replaced by an apostrophe.

Duh, you say.

We know how to type them too. Just hit that single quotation mark key. Your computer probably does the rest. Voilá! So what‘s the problem?

The problem is that an apostrophe is not a quotation mark. They may look the same half the time, but they look the opposite the other half. Your computer can‘t tell the difference. So if you type “John exclaimed,‘Rats!‘”, your helpful computer will sniff that some of those quotation marks will curl left, others will curl right. That‘s why they’re called smart quotes. ‘cause you didn’t tell them which way to curl. They just know.

Except when they don‘t.

An apostrophe does not curl different ways. It always curls this way.

Always.

Computers use their smarty-quotes feature to curl it for you, and they‘re good at it unless the apostrophe is at the beginning of a word. Then the smarty-quotes brain thinks it must be a single open quotation mark, and curls it backwards like the red example below:

Whoops! That‘s the wrong way, red guy. Remember, apostrophes always curl to the left, like the big orange one above. Always. They are not single quotation marks.

Try typing the sentence yourself and watch it go bad, automatically. Then write the above sentence by hand, on paper, with a real live pen, and watch how your own brain effortlessly gets it right.

See? You‘re smarter than a computer.

Well, usually. I recently had a fight with my editor after I fixed a glaring wrong-way apostrophe in a great big heading. He claimed, “Well, they’re supposed to go that way. That‘s how my computer always does it.” So I had to explain to an editor which way an apostrophe goes, and that he is the boss of his computer.

Now it would be wrong of me to burden you with this world-shattering problem, and not offer you a solution. So for those six of you who care, here‘s how you override your smart computer and type even smarter:

Yeah, you might want to just memorize those. I realize they‘re not the most convenient. Maybe someday computers will become even smarter and do that correction for you too.

From all of us who really love typesetting, thank you for the extra effort! That’s one less story for us to make fun of.

Now here‘s the bad news: once you get this right, you won‘t be able to stop seeing others get it wrong everywhere.

Sorry about that.