ezine articles and "curly" quotes - apostrophe's

[jkgourmet]

I am submitting my first articles to ezine. I use MS Word to write and edit my articles.

I read the stuff about the "curly" tranlation issue with quotes, dashes, apostrophe's, etc. and turned off the smart quotes thing in MS Word, like ezine suggested (at least I think that's what they suggested. . .)

When I put the article in and then look at the preview of the article, all the words with apostrophe's show up in red, like they are misspelled. Is this the way it should look, or is there something I need to fix?

[Lynn Terry]

The best thing to do is use Notepad, or any text editor. That said, if you're sure that the apostrophes are correct, it should be fine to publish. I've never had mine show up in red, but I always write in plain text then copy & paste into EA.

Anyone else know?

[jkgourmet]

How about writing in MS Word, then copying to Notepad, then copying from there to Ezine?

Word makes sense to me. I like how it formats and corrects my spelling errors. I like that I can get synonyms as I type without leaving the program. Hell, Lynn, I only discovered Notepad even existed on my computer about 8 weeks ago, and I've been using computers since like, 1980. Really - I had to google "where is notepad on my computer" to find it.

[DianaWalker]

Yes, Notepad is under "All Programs"...."Accessories"...

During my earlier days of submitting articles and doing blog posts, I also did not know this, that we need to put the wording into plain text first and it was so frustrating to have it look so bad.

Yes - doing the article or blog post in Word first, then into Notepad and then into your article post or blog post, is what I do now.

That doesn't make me feel so bad, Jeanette, because it definitely took me a long time to discover Notepad too!

Diana

[Kayla Fay]

I type into Notepad and copy/paste, and my apostrophes always show up in red, too. I've never quite gotten the hang of formatting for Ezine Articles. Your articles will post - and be approved - with those pesky red letters, though.

Is apostrophe supposed to be pluralized that way?

[marksierra]

Just my two cents here...

Using Word for its spelling capabilities and its synonym feature is fine. Don't worry about formatting though (assuming you're talking about bolding and underlining and what not). That simply won't have any effect on the end result because I don't know of any article directory that allows formatting withing the body of the article. Okay, maybe there are a few, but from what I can recall from seeing other articles, there's no formatting.

Then copying and pasting your final product into Notepad to dump all the junk Microsoft puts in is the next step. From there, you're right...just copy and paste from Notepad into the article directory and you should be set.

[jkgourmet]

A big thank you to everybody who helped out with this confusion. It may be an extra step to use ms word then cut and paste to notepad then copy and paste to ezine submit, but if that works it's fine by me. Much easier on my tire old brain than using notepad as a starting point word processing program.

[CG12]

Hi Jeanette,

Thought I would throw in a little of my own thoughts on this subject. I too use Word to write my articles to Ezine then copy and paste to Notepad before submitting the article.

I am not sure why but Ezine's text editor just does not like contractions. Those are usually the "red lines" I get when I preview my articles too, even though I know that the contractions are used correctly.

Another little time saver for me has been writing my Summary, Keywords, and Custom Bio Box (for each individual article) at the end of the article I am writing while still in Word. I then "select all" copy and paste into notepad so I will have all the info I need when I go to paste the article into the submission section on Ezine. This has really helped me not only save time but have a reference point of keywords to look at for other articles. (I tend to write my articles in a series)

Hope this helps a little.

Christine

[StephenT]

I agree with Christine that the contractions do show in red when you preview the article, but they don't show that way in the article. I used to do my article in word and then load it onto Google docs. Then I just started using ezines little word download tool and it seems to work fine. Of course I am still using a Word version that Gates made in first grade!

[CG12]

I'm glad you pointed out that the contractions appear fine in the article Stephen. I neglected to say that which was important to note because the bottom line is we want our articles to give off the best appearance without any distractions.

Christine