That initial apostrophe...

Today's quick blog post is about using the right kind of apostrophe for a word that begins with one.

If you're sitting there thinking: "Just what the bloody hell is he on about?" then this blog post is for you!

This particular punctuation error invades indie publications like a plague - but is seen alarmingly often in professionally-published works as well.  And it's the result of computers doing their job too well.

You see, modern word processing software is very good at interpreting the writer's needs.  When you're typing out inverted commas, it knows which set of curly quotes are needed at each end of the phrase.  This goes for single-quote-marks as well as double.

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The problem, of course, comes when you want to begin a word with an apostrophe.  A word like: 

Or maybe:

Modern software sees you type that apostrophe and says: "Oh!  Here's the start of a new quotation!  Better give that the curly treatment!"

And proceeds to render it thusly: 

But, of course, it is not the start of a quote.  It's an apostrophe, and should look like this: 

Your word ends up looking like: 

How to fix it?  Dunno how the pros do it (with their fancy-schmancy ways) but I just type a letter at the beginning of the word and then delete it.  This allows the software to recognize that the apostrophe is part of the word and should be drawn as such:

Then delete the "a".

Sure it's a grimy way of doing it, but in lieu of a better solution it's the one I use.

And it sure looks better than having all your apostrophes turned the wrong way around!