Punctuation that typesets badly
A word processor shows you a manuscript. A typeset page shows you a book, and the difference is mostly punctuation.
At 12 point, double spaced, ragged right, a straight apostrophe and a typographic one look like the same mark. Set that sentence in 11 point Garamond, justified, on a 6 × 9 page, and one of them is a tick left over from a typewriter key that served two purposes. Readers do not name the fault. They register the page as amateur.
Here is what changes, mark by mark.
Quotes: curly, and curling the right way
Book quotation marks are typographic — "like this" — an opening mark and a closing mark that are different characters. Turn smart quotes on and they mostly take care of themselves.
Mostly. The failure is the apostrophe at the start of a word, where an opening single quote and an apostrophe are opposite marks and auto-correct picks the wrong one. Type '90s and you get an opening quote — the comma shape leaning left — where you needed an apostrophe leaning right. Same for 'tis, 'em, 'til, and dialect spellings like 'cause.
Nothing catches these, because both characters are legal there. Search for a single quote that follows a space and check each one by eye. In a novel with dialect there may be two hundred; in most books, under twenty.
Pasted text is the other source. Anything copied from a browser or a plain-text file arrives with straight quotes baked in, and turning the setting on afterward does not convert them. Find-and-replace a straight " and a straight ' with themselves — with smart quotes on, the replace re-types each one correctly.
Three dashes, three jobs
Three characters, three widths, three meanings. Using one for another is visible in print.
- Hyphen (
-), the short one. Joins compounds: well-known, twenty-four, re-enter. It also breaks words at the end of a justified line, which the typesetter adds and removes on its own. - En dash (
–), the width of an n. Spans and ranges: pages 44–71, 1918–1939, the London–Paris route. If you would say "to" or "through", it is an en dash. - Em dash (
—), the width of an m. The interruption, the break in thought, the aside a comma is too quiet for.
Two hyphens (--) is not a dash. It is what a typewriter offered instead of one, and it sets as two short strokes with a gap. Most word processors convert it as you type and do not convert the ones already in the file.
Spaced or unspaced: pick once
Em dashes are set either tight against the words — like this — or with a space on each side. American publishing generally sets them closed; British publishing often sets them open. Both are correct. A book that does both is not, and that is what happens when 40,000 words were written before you thought about it. Decide, then find-and-replace to match.
In the Interior Formatter. It keeps your punctuation exactly as your manuscript has it and sets it at real size, justified, in a real book face — which is where a stray double hyphen or a straight apostrophe finally becomes obvious. Previews are free and unlimited, so fix the file and look again. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Ellipses and the line break
An ellipsis is one character (…), not three periods. Three periods have word spaces available between them, so a justified line can break after any of them — stranding one period at the end of a line and two at the start of the next — and those spaces stretch as the line fills, spreading the periods apart.
Type the single character, or let your word processor substitute it. Spacing around it is a house choice like the dashes: pick one.
Double spaces after a period
One space. Two is a typewriter convention for monospaced type, where every character was the same width and the sentence break needed help.
The cost is specific. Justified text sets a line by stretching its word spaces; a doubled space stretches to twice every other gap on that line, so it prints as a hole. Enough of them down a page and you get a river — a pale channel the eye follows down instead of across. See Widows, orphans and rivers: the faults readers feel.
Find two spaces, replace with one, and run it twice — three spaces become two on the first pass.
Dialogue
The conventions are fixed, and readers notice a departure without knowing why.
- A new paragraph for each speaker. Two voices in one paragraph is the most common fault in a first novel.
- Punctuation goes inside the quotation mark in US practice —
"I know," she said.Commas and periods inside, always; question marks and exclamation points inside when they belong to the speech, outside when they belong to the sentence around it. - Interruption takes an em dash; trailing off takes an ellipsis.
"But I never—"is a sentence cut short by something."But I never…"is a voice fading out. Different events, different marks. - Speech that runs several paragraphs takes an opening quotation mark on every paragraph and a closing one only at the very end. The missing closing mark is the signal that the same person is still talking.
Non-breaking spaces
A number and its unit should not land on two lines. 300 at the end of one line and DPI at the start of the next is a stumble. A non-breaking space — Ctrl+Shift+Space in most tools — glues them. Use it for measurements, for Chapter 12, for initials like J. R. R., and nowhere else; it defeats the line breaker, which is usually right.
What a tool can and cannot fix
A good typesetter converts mechanically: straight quotes to typographic, double hyphens to em dashes, three periods to an ellipsis, doubled spaces to single. Those have one correct answer.
Ambiguity has none. Whether '90s wanted an apostrophe or a quotation mark depends on what you meant. Whether a dash is an interruption or a range depends on the sentence. Whether the speaker changed depends on the scene. Those are yours to fix, in the manuscript, before you set it.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Accents, symbols and characters that go missing · Also: Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly · Widows, orphans and rivers: the faults readers feel · Chapter openings and scene breaks