When Curly Quotes Go Wild My Hilarious Journey to Fixing Prowriting Aid Errors

Ah, the joys of editing! It’s a writer’s rite of passage—draft after draft, correction after correction. With each pass, I hoped for improvement. As I dove into my 12th edit, everything felt pretty great. That was until I stumbled upon an unexpected twist involving the FIX feature in Prowriting Aid, designed to help with consistency issues. I anticipated a smooth process for correcting my mismatched curly and straight quotes. Instead, I discovered a hilarious problem: the tool was converting my closing quotes into apostrophes. Cue the dramatic sigh!

The confusion started when I instructed the tool to standardize my quotes. I expected a seamless experience and was brought crashing back to reality when the automatic corrections turned my elegant closing quotes into sneaky little apostrophes. What should have read as polished text resembled early text speak. I thought I was on a smooth ride into the 12th edit, but the truth had other plans!

Straight or Curly Quotes? That is the ? That she wrote

As I prepared for my 13th edit, I was armed with nothing more than a strong cup of Diet Pepsi (WINK) and a somewhat resigned attitude. I will correct every one of those apostrophe impostors back to their rightful quote status. Yes, an arduous task—like searching for a needle in a haystack with only something of a million words to go through, but the entertaining escapades of fixing Prowriting Aid errors had only just begun.

But these little inconsistencies will mess with my readers. I do prefer curly quotes. To me it's a symbol with attitude. After all, curly quotes have personality! But I know people are wanting this book, so I go and ask Claude to fix simply quote issues, small spelling errors (With dyslexia, it's good to have a double check always.)

The humor kept bubbling up as I see it goes out and spits out straight quotes. What no personality? Now do I go for speed or do I go for personality. So sad, I want both, but nothing is perfect.