Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
It’s what you are used to, so it looks more correct. “I prefer it as it’s less confusing with apostrophes”.
The UK uses both schemes depending on era and publisher. Mostly Ireland used the double quote. The " and ' came in with typewriters, extended to teletype in 1928, which almost unchanged in style were used on computers till late 1970s and thus the IBM PC keyboard layout is based on a 19th Century mechanism.
Sadly wordprocessors still get various so called smart quotes wrong and Publishers don't seem to check. Such as ’tis, ’80s and —” are often ‘ and “. Also now only older stuff has prime and double prime as in 5′ 4″ (feet, inches or minutes, seconds).
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That's a really good reason to use double quotes.
It's actually rather easy to check single quotes for errors in smartening as long as you use double quotes for speech. You just search for the open and close single quotes to see if they are correct.