Question Workflow Discussions

Is there any guide for workflow issues? For example, an author wants some reviews for grammar and spelling. How would they request assistance and where would it go?

Is there a style guide or should we make one. Should we use normal single and double spaces or should we use the specific left/right versions such as “ (left double quote), ” (right double quote), ‘ (left single quote), ’ (right single quote). There appears to be a great deal of variance on this issue. I have seen some start with an ASCII single quote and end with a right single quote.

The quote thing is mostly a matter of proofreading. Each country/language has a preferred quoting style, but authors are known to create their own variations to address special needs. In particular, look at the "Merry" stories, where Renae use various special delimiters to differentiate all the voices in Merry's head.

Since the canon authors are mostly Americans (or at least, they were originally), the canon stories tend to use the American style of quoting: double quotes at the first level, with single quotes at the second, double at the third level and so on. I understand Brits tend to start with single quotes... and when we go to other languages, there's all sorts of variations. In particular, there are languages (French, Portuguese) which use dashes instead of quotes to indicate dialog, and that places different constraints on how to structure the story. So, if you are used to a different system, take into account that switching to the American system may not be just a matter of replacing one character for another; you might have to structure your text a bit differently.

Curly quotes a.k.a. "smart" quotes (or more correctly, typographic-style quotes) are visually nice but not really required. One reason for inconsistency is that some software replaces straight quotes with curly quotes and others don't; if you begin a project in one environment and finish in a different one, that can occur.