Last week, I asked how you would locate quotations within quotations in a Word document in order to style the inner quotes with single quotation marks.
Your answers ranged from nonstarting to overthought to brilliant!
Some of the answers worked fine for locating all of the hundreds of quotations, but since I wanted to locate only the twenty or so inner quotations, those solutions weren’t practicable. Macros for automatic replacements were likewise out of the question, since I was making corrections on paper proofs.
Kathleen McLaughlin gave the most clear-headed answer, the one I actually used: go to the original, unedited file and search for the opening double quotation marks. (In the original file, which featured British-style punctuation, these appeared only for inner quotations. Outer quotations had single quotation marks.) Mark the corrections on the proofs. Simple, fast.
Molly Hinshaw succeeded in solving the word-processing challenge (which did not indicate the availability of the original file) in a way that is both efficient and thorough.
Molly reasoned that on the proofs, quotations within quotations would look like the following (in other words, there were double quotation marks for every quotation, even where single quotation marks were needed). I'll bold them in red, for emphasis:
“Son of Atreus: now, my lord, the Achaians are trying
to make a speech even longer than mine and fillèd with more blather
[many lines of blather]
and Kalchas spoke straightway a quote within a thundering quote:
“Zeus of the counsels has shown us this great portent, a new sign:
that in the tenth year we shall end this honking great speech.”
[end of inner speech; many more lines of outer speech]
So he spoke to us then, all you warriors nodding from boredom.
But come, you glazed-eyed Achaians, let every man stay
here, until we have spoken as long as the bard of Priam.”
What marks such passages as awry is that opening quotation marks appear two in a row, with no closed quotation mark between them. This suggests how to locate the inner quotations in one simple step:
In the MS Word file, use a wildcard search to locate all text that lies between two open quotation marks. (To do this, open the Find and Replace box. Click the checkbox beside “Use wildcards.” Type \“*\“ into the Find box.) The result will look like this:
“Son of Atreus: now, my lord, the Achaians are trying
to make a speech even longer than mine and fillèd with more blather
[many lines of blather]
and Kalchas spoke straightway a quote within a thundering quote:
“Zeus of the counsels has shown us this great portent, a new sign:
that in the tenth year we shall end this honking great speech.”
[end of inner speech; many more lines of outer speech]
So he spoke to us then, all you warriors nodding from boredom.
But come, you glazed-eyed Achaians, let every man stay
here, until we have spoken as long as the bard of Priam.”
At the end of the highlighting, you can see the opening quotation mark for the inner quote.
In this way, it took only about ten minutes to locate every inner quotation in the Word file and check the corresponding page on the proofs to confirm that the proofreader had marked every instance. (She had.)
Kathleen and Molly, well done! And thank you to everyone who gave this thought and offered suggestions. In future, I would love to post more challenges. Feel free to suggest one on my Questions page.
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