<p>Does the Common App allow for quotation marks and apostrophes? This may sound stupid but I ask because in other online apps, pasting 's and "s turn into something like this &@#<em>^</em>&@#$*&(%&</p>
<p>It should be fine. I just pasted my essays in there, and everything looked fine.</p>
<p>I would be careful. Check your Microsoft Word. It has what Microsoft calls "smart quotes" which are really just curved quotation marks. The problem is, they're not ASCII standard characters, so if you put them in certain web applications, they come out as a string of funky characters. I forget where the setting is in Word, but if you do some googling you should be able to figure out where it is. </p>
<p>My totally-unsubstantiated-by-fact-or-experience guess would be that if your essay looks fine on the PDF/Print out/Preview, you're fine.</p>