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Grammarly - Inconsistent punctuation fix bug

As I wrote in my previous post (Grammarly - I think I like it), I've been using Grammarly to proof my book. I'm still happy with it, but I did discover a problem it has with certain punctuation imported in a Word .docx file.

One of Grammarly's features is a fix for 'Inconsistent punctuation.' It was upset that my files (which were .docx files exported from Adobe InDesign) contained a mix of straight and curly apostrophe and quotation marks. I think the problem is that internally InDesign fixes these issues in your original text on the fly, but if you export the text it sends out the original formatting rather than changing the punctuation.
I figured that making this change in Grammarly was a good idea, but what I discovered is that after doing this, there were instances where single apostrophes and quotation marks were moved, particularly around a 'word' or if I had a single apostrophe next to quotation marks: "And then he shouted 'Fire!'"

In this example an apostrophe was moved from the front of 'spending' to the end of the previous word!:

Here the quote mark was moved to the beginning of the next word instead of being after the apostrophe:

I did an experiment with the text, both importing .docx files and pasting the same text into Grammarly. Interestingly, pasted text seemed to keep its formatting, but an imported .docx file would be munged after the Inconsistent punctuation check.

A paragraph pasted into Grammarly and processed doesn't move the quote mark away from the apostrophe:
The same paragraph imported as a .docx file and then processed moves the quote mark:
Fortunately, I noticed the problem and searching for .' and ,' and ?' found most of the issues.

From now on I'm going to avoid the Inconsistent punctuation check and let InDesign fix the text.

Comments

  1. Neil JacobsonFebruary 23, 2021 at 2:53 PM

    How do you avoid the inconsistent punctuation check

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maya RajeshApril 26, 2021 at 9:49 PM

    Oh, now I know why this is showing up... It's been a problem with my checker for quite sometime now. Any idea how to get rid of it?

    ReplyDelete

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