<p>Is there a wierd glitch in the MIT application or is it just me? Whenever I seem to use quotation marks, it seems perfectly fine. But once I save it, every single quotation mark turns into questions marks like this: ���. Is this normal? Should I just leave it like that?</p>
<p>Oh and every time I save, those weird question marks seem to exponentially duplicate.</p>
<p>I applied for EA, and I had the same experience. However when I did the final preview before submission, all of them were gone. I am not sure why that happens. (BTW, I was using safari on my mac).</p>
<p>I believe that Word uses a special symbol for the quotation marks that myMIT doesn’t recognize. In the actual essay box, just retype the " to replace the ���. Same thing goes for “em” dashes.</p>
<p>yeah i just backspaced and retyped. another glitch i found was that even if you were at or under the word limit, it still sometimes said that it was too long. i figured out that if you delete enough until you can actually save it without any warnings or whatever, you can add the deleted part back in and save it again and it won’t be too long. i dunno how i discovered this lol but i worked hard making those essays fit the limit and i wasn’t about to let a computer tell me they were too long :p</p>
<p>Word uses smart quotes, which replace bland vertical quotation marks (") with more “exciting” glyphs that actually curve to fit the text. The right and left quotation marks aren’t part of the application’s character encoding, though, so they turn into the funny looking question marks. </p>
<p>If it’s helpful, you can tell Word to stop using smart quotes:</p>
<p>[the</a> How-To Geek](<a href=“http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/Disable_Smart_Quotes_in_Word_2007]the”>http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/Disable_Smart_Quotes_in_Word_2007)</p>