Quotation marks facing wrong direction (Word 2002/3)

Topic

New Reply

What would cause end quotation marks to be at the beginning? In the enclosed file, after Reading, Unit 2, there are end quotation marks before “I Have” and “Abraham.” Is there any reason for this?
Thank you very much.
Alan Silberlight

Reply | Quote

Replies

It’s because they are preceded by manual line breaks instead of paragraph breaks.
If you type a space at the beginning of the line, then a quotation mark, it will face in the correct direction; you can then delete the space.

Reply | Quote

Thank you very much. You are correct. Why does this occur with a manual line break? Is this deliberate? What function does beginning a quote with end quotation marks have? This has made me curious. Thank you, again.
Alan Silberlight

Reply | Quote

You’d have to ask someone on the Word development team within Microsoft why this happens. I’d say it is a bug.

Reply | Quote

The manual line break “character” apparently is not on Word’s short list of “stuff that signals the intention to start a new quotation.” A space, a paragraph break, and a manual page break (which looks for all intents and purposes like a paragraph break) are on that list, of course, but so is a hyphen. There must be someone who decides these things, the guru of punctuation… I guess in exchange for the convenience we have to live with someone’s strange choices.

Reply | Quote

Thank you very much for your quick response—-would it be possible to define what a “paragraph break” is? I am assuming that it is just hitting the Enter key once or twice. Also, from what I can see, one can have a manual page break by either hitting Control>Enter or by Insert>Break>Page Break. Am I correct?

Sincerely,
Alan Silberlight

Reply | Quote

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Hopefully I got all of them.

Reply | Quote

Ah, the guru of punctuation at MS. Why didn’t I think of that?

I also always wondered why =rand(), when typed at the beginning of a line, didn’t work when you entered a manual page break. And now I see it also doesn’t work when you enter a manual line break. So when is a new page not a new page? I should have asked the guru of punctuation at MS.

Fred

PS: for those who may not know, =rand() typed at the beginning of a “real” line (not after the above manual breaks), gets converted to 3 paragraphs of 5 identical sentences of “The quick brown fox…”. That’s English. Other sentences in other languages. It saves typing if you want to get some text quickly on a page to demonstrate things like how to make words bold. Great time saver for instructors.

Reply | Quote