Joel Dueck ·

Manually type punctuation

Em- and en-dashes, proper quotes and apostrophes (“curly” or “smart” to some), emoji, and math symbols should be manually typed and stored as such in the original text source. Do not rely on Smartypants-style text processing at any step after writing to produce typographically correct punctuation.

This ensures that the text will be correct no matter how it is eventually published, syndicated or repurposed.

If you choose to type ASCII approximations of proper punctuation rather than the real thing, then you’ll need to find and configure a post-processor to fix it for each separate medium in which you eventually publish it. The post-processor is going to be wrong sometimes (such as for leading contractions or abbreviated year numbers), which means you’ll have to fiddle with the source anyway to fix it.

If you’re typing in an application that is able to correct the punctuation while you’re typing, and if it usually makes the correct choice, then it can make sense to let the computer handle it. But such support is far from universal, even now, in 2025. UTF-8 support, though, is universal: the rare program that barfs on a curly quote is considered to be unusually defective. So it is simpler and faster to rely on UTF-8 and muscle memory, and you will always get correct results.

There is a competing opinion, which says that setting the correct punctuation is properly the job of the computer, not the author. And yes, this would be a more sensible division of labor — but the computer still isn’t a reliable partner here.

Typing

MacOS has built in shortcuts that are not hard to type.

When I’m using a Windows computer, I use this AutoHotkey script which implements the same shortcuts using the Win key, which is in the same place as Opt on a Mac keyboard, so the exact same muscle memory produces the same result.

On both platforms, I also have shortcuts configured for ≈ and ×, as well as arrow glyphs.