Ever imagined the headache you create when you send your beautiful-looking press release or PR copy over to a journalist to use? Ever thought that they might have to sit there and strip out all the formatting and special characters and replace them with standard ones? 

If you want your PR material to be easier-to-use for the journalist, easily re-publishable elsewhere and basically more portable, then you need to be aware of the trouble that MS smart quotes can cause. Sometimes you wonder why your article is suddenly littered with strange characters or with question marks all over the place when it is converted to HTML. It looks fine when it’s in Word and only intended for that application, but when you want to start using it in PR article marketing distribution or send it to an email newsletter audience, it looks strange. That’s because Microsoft Word automatically has smart quotes turned on.

Smart quotes changes standard characters, like quote marks,  apostrophes, double dashes, and 3 dots in a row, into the typographer’s equivalent curly quotes, curly apostrophes, long dashes (em dashes) and ellipsis, because it looks better. Smart quotes have a very important place in printed material and .pdf formats, but in web-destined copy they can just cause more work. Email newsletter servers for example have no tolerance for MS Word smart quotes, because they are not valid ASCII characters, so they don’t recognise them. Then you see all the silly characters go into your work to replace them. Want to make the journalist happy; want your email to appear like it’s supposed to whether in text or HTML– simply turn smart quotes off. Here’s how to do it from within MS Word:

• Click on the Office Button at the top left corner
• Click on the Word Options button at the bottom of the dialogue box
• Click Proofing on the left hand menu
• Click the AutoCorrect Options button at the top. 
• Select the Auto Format tab. Under Replace or Replace as you Type, deselect or clear the "straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box.
• Do the same for other characters.

Or just search smart quotes in MS Word Help.