Punctuation

Learn to type the correct character entities, your authors, editors, and designers will thank you for it. Maybe, one day, assistive technology will thank you too.

Quotes, Apostrophes, and Primes

Quotes	Mac	Windows	Entities (without charset utf-8)
‘ Single opening quote	⌥ Opt + ]	Alt + 0 1 4 5	‘ or ‘
’ Single closing & apostrophe	⌥ Opt + ⇧ Shift + ]	Alt + 0 1 4 6	’ or ’
“ Double opening	⌥ Opt + [	Alt + 0 1 4 7	“ or “
” Double closing	⌥ Opt+ ⇧ Shift + [	Alt + 0 1 4 8	” or ”

Screen Readers May Not Read Punctuation

Sobering but important to note that most punctuation will be read back to the visiter simply as a pause in the sentence. Read Why Don’t Screen Readers Always Read What’s on the Screen?, from the Deque Blog.

Dashes

The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar in appearance to the minus sign, but differs from these symbols in both length and height.

HyphenUse a hyphen to break single words into parts or to join separate words into single words.En-DashUse an en-dash for spanning dates to replace “to” or “and”.Em-DashUse an em-dash for a break in thought similar to but stronger than one contained within parentheses.

Dashes	Mac	Windows	Entities (without charset utf-8)
- Hyphen	-
– En-Dash	⌥ Opt + -	Alt + 0 1 5 0	–
— Em-Dash	⌥ Opt + Shift + -	Alt + 0 1 5 1	—

Multiplication

• [To do] Add multiplication sign (use between dimensions)

Resources

• Smart Quotes for Smart People, by Jason Santa Maria for details on quotes, apostrophes, and primes.

• Straight and curly quotes, an excerpt from Matthew Butterick’s book on Practical Typography.

• Quotes & Accents (& Dashes), by Jessica Hishe for advice on smart quotes and dashes. Read the part about dashes!

• Unicode Character Table, coded entity reference for all special characters.

• The Punctuation Guide, for details on proper punctuation.