I’m trying, these days, to stop typing “stupid quotes”, to stop over-hyphenating, and to stop making homemade ellipses. Have I gone crazy? Or has the WORLD GONE CRAZY?!

Why, the world has gone crazy, of course, as it always does. I’ll explain. Look at any magazine article, any newspaper column, any book. Look carefully and then notice how it doesn’t look like most of your emails or most web articles:

• In a book, quote marks “surround” the quote (like that), pointing in opposite directions. On a computer you usually get "dumb quotes" (like those), abusing the ditto mark—used to specify inches, as in 3.5"—for quotes.

• In a book, dashes that separate thoughts—like this—are long dashes, known as “em-dashes” because they are the width of a lowercase “m”. An “en-dash” (width of an “n”) is used to separate ranges, as in: pages 79–92. Finally, the hyphen, the shortest one, is used for (naturally) hy-phen-a-tion. On a keyboard, people use the hyphen for all three.

• In a book, an ellipsis is used for things that trail off…or to describe a series of things that are implied to continue, like lists, sequences, and more… An ellipsis has a little extra space between the dots. Just typing three periods isn’t exactly the same thing. Notice: … (ellipsis) vs. ... (three periods). Sometimes people try to type the spaces in between the periods but then it’s too much space: . . . (three periods with space).

How did this business of using shabby knock-off versions of well-established typography on our computers get started? The answer is the manual typewriter, with its limited set of keys. I am old enough that I actually learned to type on my dad’s portable manual typewriter, a spiffy red Olivetti with white keys. Such a cool machine! (Here’s a picture of one, in a different color.) The problem with this machine, and all others like it, was that it was too simple to be able to reproduce what a real typesetter was and is capable of. Instead, you used the given keys to approximate typeset text.

The Olivetti didn’t even have an exclamation point. You were expected to type a period, then backspace, then type a single ditto mark. Behold, a sort-of-exclamation point. Single quotes and apostrophes were done with the ditto and double-ditto. Ellipses were approximated by typing three periods (perhaps separated by spaces), and so on.

The computer keyboard, being the descendant of this manual keyboard, carries forward the same limitations. Even when desktop publishing and typesetting finally arrived for the desktop computer, with proportionally spaced fonts, people’s typewriter habits persisted. The screens often still showed monospaced fonts reminiscent of the old Olivetti’s output, but when these shortcuts were printed out on laser printers, the deficiencies stood out. Hyphens in a true proportional font are much narrower than in a monospace font, so fake em-dashes and en-dashes really stick out. Same with fake quotes made with dittoes.

And now here we are in the age of electronic documents, where the fonts on screen are finally rendered proportionally and antialiased: beautiful, like a book, except that they show up our glaring leftover manual typewriter habits.

There are a few word processors, including Word, AppleWorks, and Mellel, that are set up to catch the use of dittoes and turn them into quotes, to catch double hyphens and turn them into em-dashes, and possibly even three periods into an ellipsis. But frankly, this is equivalent to automatically capitalizing the first letter of a sentence. It’s nice for the word processor to do it, but it would be even better if I learned to produce the actual typographic marks myself—the way that it’s better to have an actual exclamation-point key instead of composing it out of dots and dittoes.

So I’m training myself to do exactly that, to explicitly type the characters I mean to type, to break my old typewriter habits. I know how to enter these typographic characters in Wordsmith on my Palm, and in any text field on my Mac, so that even when I don’t have a smart word processor cleaning up after me, my text will still look typeset, not typewritten. I can confidently spend brain cells on this habit, knowing that these “new” marks can now be displayed anywhere—in any browser or PDF document, particularly if the text encoding is UTF-8. The age of true desktop typesetting has arrived—at least for persnickety people like me…!