erastes

Twice in two days I’ve seen two different people say that they have to go through their entire manuscript and replace double quotes with single ones (or vice versa) manually.

why? why why why?

FIND AND REPLACE, people. Don’t be frightened of it. If you are methodical with it it’s a hugely handy tool. Here’s the instructions for replacing single quotes with double ones.

1. FIND ‘

2. REPLACE “

(make sure of course your manuscript is using straight quotes in the first place, if the publisher wants curly quotes they can do them, but you should be using straights for your word processing.

Of course, what will happen is that you will end up with all your apostrophes as double quotes, but this is easily fixed too.

3. FIND “s

4. REPLACE ‘s

5. FIND s”

4. REPLACE s’

and so on. Of course, you can run a swift spell check and it will easily change don”t to don’t etc

much much much quicker than doing it by hand, believe you me.

You can also use this technique to standardise the space after your full stop to two spaces rather than one. That can also be fiddly, but still MUCH faster and reliable than scouring 300 or more pages and getting eyestrain.

Happy to do it for you, of course, for a small fee!