On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure, take 2

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I finally make the tour a reality.

A while back, I wrote a post that outlined my ideas for a 9-day helicopter tour to various destinations in the southwest. After writing up the tour, I realized some of the impracticalities of it — for example, booking the hotel rooms and tours in advance and the little FAA rest rule that forbid me to fly part 135 flights more than 7 days in a row (oops).

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tour. I’ve since shortened it up and devised a more reasonable plan: a 6-day, 5-night excursion that includes Sedona, Grand Canyon, Lake Powell at Page, Monument Valley, and Flagstaff, with excellent accommodations and side trips and tours at each destination.

You can read the finalized description on the Flying M Air Web site’s new Excursions page. I haven’t added the photos yet and I’ve just begun work on the brochure. But I do have 7 sets of dates scheduled and ready to go. With a more approachable price tag of $4,995 per couple, most folks I’ve spoken to seem to think it’ll sell very well. Now all I need to do is get the word out about the trip’s availability.

Are you ready to go on a helicopter adventure? Well, what are you waiting for? Stop by the Flying M Air Web site and get the details. Then give me a call to book your trip.

helicopter, excursion, Sedona, Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Page, Monument Valley, Flagstaff

Keeping Up to Date with this Site

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A few tips for keeping up to date with what’s new without having to surf over here every day or two.

The other day, Cliff, one of my editors, asked me (in an iChat chat) what the best way was to keep track of the new material on this site. He wanted to read my “pearls of wisdom” (his words, not mine, and I think he was teasing me) regularly.

Cliff uses a newsreader to monitor blogs. I think he was more interested in the how-to stuff I write to support my books than the somewhat boring pieces about my every day life. After all, do people really want to know that as I type this, my bird is barking like a dog in the next room? Or that I hung up on a Republican canvasser who called me in my office today? Or that today’s humidity in Phoenix is only 3%?

I told Cliff there were a few ways to keep up with this site’s new content:

  • Subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire blog. The good thing about doing this is that you won’t miss anything new. The 25 most recent posts are always available in the feed, so if you check in at least once a week, you’ll be all set. The bad thing about that is that you have to use a newsreader (which many people don’t use). And you will get summaries of all 25 most recently posted articles, including the ones about barking birds, being rude to republicans, and Arizona weather. If you want to do this, use my Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger.
  • Visit my RSS feeds page and subscribe to just the feed(s) that interest you. Just interested in a book or two? Subscribe to just the feeds for those titles. Want to learn more about flying a helicopter for hire? Subscribe to just that topic’s feed. You’ll still need a newsreader, but at least you won’t have to read summaries about posts that you don’t think will interest you. (Of course, you may be surprised by what you miss.)
  • Use the E-mail Notification form in the navigation bar on most (if not all) pages of this site to subscribe to this blog by e-mail. This is a great way to keep up with the site without having to set up or use a newsreader. I subscribed to see how it worked and I’m very pleased with the results. Each day that I post to this blog, an e-mail message is created that provides a brief summary, with links, for all the posts written that day. So if I wrote 10 posts that day, you get one e-mail. If I wrote one post that day, you get one e-mail. If I didn’t write any posts that day, you don’t get an e-mail at all. The e-mail goes out in the middle of the night, so the message is in your in-box in the morning (like the New York Times, delivered, but without the airs). There are no ads and you don’t get spammed. Best of all, when you get sick of reading this drivel, you can cancel your subscription to stop the e-mails.

Of course, you can always make a point of stopping by this site to see what’s new — the old fashioned way. Visitors are always welcome.

And have you read yet about my chicken with the crooked beak?

rss, newsreader, blog, notification

Oregon Coast…in Fog

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Just after dawn at Fort Stevens State Park.

A lot of the photos in the header for this blog come from the 16-day road trip I took in August 2006. This is one of them.

I spent the night in a yurt at Ft. Stevens State Park on the northwestern tip of Oregon. In the morning, I went to the beach for sunrise. Unfortunately — or so I thought at the time — it was foggy. But when I did a little exploring around the deserted post-dawn park, I found some beautiful images that my little digital camera had no trouble capturing.

Oregon Coast in the FogThis dock stretches into a body of water not far from the coast. It was a haunting image, made magical by the reflections of the dock and grasses off the perfectly smooth water surface.

There was a fisherman there that morning, too, but we didn’t ruin the moment — or wonderful silence — with conversation. I moved around as quietly as I could, snapping photos here and there. He cast out his line, reeled it in, and casted it out again. After a while, I slipped back into my car and disappeared into the fog.

The next time I had Internet access, I sent the photos I took that morning to Mike via e-mail. He told me they were the best photos I’d taken so far on the trip.

The credit goes to the fog.

Oregon, coast, fog, Ft. Stevens State Park

Alex’s Favorite Snack

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Edamame.

Alex the Bird absolutely loves edamame — soy bean pods. I buy them frozen at the local Safeway Supermarket and keep them in the freezer. Every few days, I put a handful into a bowl, add a splash of water, cover the bowl, and put it in the microwave for 5 minutes on high. Ten minutes later (cooking time plus sitting time), they’re done. I let them cool on the counter top and then drain all the water and stick the bowl in the fridge.

Alex Eats EdamameWhen Alex is good — which is pretty often, I’m glad to say — I give him a few edamame pods as a treat. I usually give it to him when he’s standing on the divider between our two kitchen sinks (see photo) or in his cage — I really hate cleaning the shells up off the floor. He holds a pod in one foot while he uses his beak to coax out one of the beans. He peels the skin off the bean, mushes the bean a little with his mouth, and swallows it. Sometimes I think he swallows the bean whole. He can eat the two or three beans in a pod very quickly — faster than many people I know. And then he drops the empty shell and looks at me, waiting for another one.

Sometimes I take the edamame beans and stuff them with shredded paper into one of Alex’s cage-like puzzle toys. Although he used to pull out all the paper to find and eat the beans, he’s now learned how to get just the beans out, leaving most of the paper behind. I challenge him by stuffing as much paper as I can around the beans and he still amazes me by retrieving just the beans. Obviously, I need practice.

I think that if I put 100 beans in front of him, he’d eat them all. He really loves them. But then he’d get sick. And a sick parrot is not something I ever want to deal with.

African Grey, parrot, edamame