Smart Quotes

Perhaps you have to BE a technical writer to understand. We care deeply about things like punctuation, typography, page layout, navigation, and usability. It keeps us up at night. We can have endless discussions on whether there should be two spaces or just one after a period. (One, people, ONE! The computer is NOT a typewriter!!) And on that particular issue the camps are divided and never the twain shall meet. (Don't even go there!)

Colleague Dick Margulis has an excellent blog on typography and had encountered a problem where the curly or "smart" quotes he was using in his posts were not showing up in the burned RSS feed summaries. Not only were they absent, they were behaving like delimiters and allowing parts of the text between them to drop out. In the end, he did two very technical-writer-ish things: he reported it as a bug to Feedburner, the folks who create the RSS feed, and he posted the problem to a list of other techwriters to garner collective wisdom on the subject.

That's what technical writers do, among other things. We try to solve problems and then explain them so other people won't have them, we get solutions from other experts, and if necessary we report the bugs so that they can be fixed.

In record time, i.e., overnight, Feedburner twiddled with something so that the smart quotes problem has disappeared. This swift response from technicians is something most techwriters only dream of. Therefore, Feedburner has gone up a few notches in my estimation! They have made the world a little safer for typographers, techwriters, and readers.

You may not have noticed, nor cared, that there is a difference between "these quotes" and “these quotes” but some of us do notice, and we do care. Someone has to.