Punctuation
Q. What’s the proper orientation of the apostrophe when using a contraction such as ’70s or a title such as ’Night Mother? Should it curve as the computer sets it?
A. Apostrophes come in only one shape—they curve like a backward c and happen to be identical to a closing single quotation mark. (The flipped version, curved like a c, is an opening single quotation mark.) Word-processing applications are not yet sophisticated enough to know the difference between an opening quotation mark and an apostrophe at the beginning of a word, so they automatically supply an opening quote mark at the beginning of a word. If you’re preparing text for typesetting, identify apostrophes with a typed code (like <ap>). If you’re preparing an HTML file, the apostrophe and closing single quotation are Unicode 0027; the opening single quotation mark is 2018.
