When fixing unbalanced quotes, don't fix quotes that should be unbalanced.
When using quote marks around speech, if the speech is more than one paragraph, closing quotes are not used at the end of each paragraph, but only at the end of the last paragraph:
He said, "This is a long bit of reported speech I'm making, so long that I'll have to break it into more than one paragraph.
"This is still me speaking, continuing my speech in a new paragraph, and looking set to carry on until the audience falls asleep.
"In fact, I have so little to say, but I'm using so many words to say it, that I suspect my some people in my audience are quietly creeping out the back of the hall."
Quote:
Originally Posted by ShellShock
I think the biggest problem here is the unbalanced quotes - I can't think of any way of automatically balancing them, because this requires natural language skills.
Assuming you have manually balanced the quotes, you could then use the Word auto-correct feature to replace " with the smart quotes throughout the document - this uses a different character for opening and closing quotes. It would then be possible to global search and replace e.g., opening quote followed by space, with just an opening quote.
I have had to go through exactly this process with one of the books I read recently. As I read the book on the reader, I book-marked pages with errors, so that later I could fix these errors in Word (the source document was an RTF). Unbalanced quotes were one of the biggest problems, and I could not think of any way of automatically fixing them (and I am a programmer).
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