Checking for Missing Quotation Marks

That is so helpful. Works brilliantly!
Thank you !!!

I made this work (after some trial and error) on my Mac by replacing "147" with "210" and "148" with "211" in the macro. I'm a rudimentary user of macros so if there is something else I should also change, please let me know.

Hello! In my texts we are using a double low-9 quotation mark as an opening quotation mark. Thus all instances of quotations marks are marked in yellow or have a comment (when using another macro suggested below), as macros don't recognize low-9 as the opening quotation mark.
I tried substituting Chr(34) with Chr(132), if I got that right, but it didn't help.

https://everythingfonts.com/ascii/codes/132

As an example:

„Jilly-bean?“

The opening quotation mark is not recognized by macros :(
Any help would be really appreciated!

Here's my stab at this, a bit more simple, but it seems to work. Stray quotes are marked with a comment.

Sub FindStrayQuotes()

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
ActiveDocument.Content.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight

With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Replacement.Highlight = True
.Text = "^0147[!^0147^0148]@^0148"
.Replacement.Text = "^&"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = True
.MatchWildcards = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With

With ActiveDocument.Content
With .Find
.Highlight = False
.Text = "[^0147^0148]"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = True
.MatchWildcards = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.Execute
End With
Do While .Find.Found
.Comments.Add .Duplicate, "Pair missing?"
.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
.Find.Execute
Loop
End With

ActiveDocument.Content.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

By the way, to use this macro, copy the script. In Word, go to View tab > Macros rolldown. Choose View Macros.
Enter a Name in the Macro Name field. In the dialog buttons, choose Create.
A Visual Basic editor will open on top of Word. Here, paste the copied script over the template starter text and press Save (in the visual basic editor). Close Visual Basic. Go to Macros panel again and select your saved macro and press Run (there's also a Run command in the visual basic editor)

Thanks Allen. This macro script works well.

If anyone is interested:
Before you run the macro, select all document text, then make sure in Home tab that highlighting of text is cleared (or No Color).
After you run the macro, go to Find > Advanced, Format > Highlight (with no text in textfield) and hit Next to jump through the results, if any.

Jackie,

Take a look at the yellow box at the very end of the tip. It includes a link that leads to helpful info in this regard.

-Allen

Several times over the years of receiving your newsletter I have tried to recreate your macros but with no success. Once I believe you told me all I had to do was copy it into a "create macro" and that also has failed. How do I use the macros you provide?

Thank you for your assistance

If you modify the macro to use paragraph marks instead of quote marks for the start of the selection, you can test for unbalanced quotes. Just change your <0 to <> 0

Had to change your .find setting to allow for paragraph marks to be found.

Also, the smart quotes in my document are 210 and 211, not sure if it's the character set or ??
I put a limit on the main loop when I changed to paragraphs, it didn't seem to end. I haven't debugged that yet.

The macro is really great, but I can't get it working when I'm looking for mismatching double angle quotes (»...«), Chr (187) resp. Chr (171). Could you, please, give me a hint how to solve this? Your help is much appreciated!

Hi Ken Endacott,

Your macro is working great for double quotes and it is very useful for me. However, it is not working for single Quotes. It would be grateful if you provide the macro for single quotes as well.

Thanks & Regards,
Ashok

The macro has some shortcomings, for example it won’t detect a singleton closing quote, nor will it detect incorrectly nested quotes that are a mixture of straight and curly quotes.
The following macro will correctly match straight with straight and curly with curly quotes even if they are nested or overlap. It does this by building a list of all quotes in the paragraph and then deleting matched quotes, inner nested first. If there are anything left in the list then there are mismatched quotes. The macro removes any existing highlighting in the document before checking. It is reasonably fast, taking around 15 seconds to process a 500 page document.

Sub MarkUnevenQuotesWithNesting()
Dim Q
Dim ch As Long
Dim sRaw As String
Dim changeTest As Boolean
Dim J As Long
Dim i As Long

ActiveDocument.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
i = 0
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = """"
.Replacement.Text = ""
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = True
End With
Selection.Find.Execute

While Selection.Find.Found
Set Q = Nothing
Set Q = New Collection
Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdParagraph, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
sRaw = Selection.Text
For J = 1 To Len(sRaw)
ch = Asc(Mid(sRaw, J, 1))
If ch = 34 Or ch = 147 Or ch = 148 Then
Q.Add ch
End If
Next J

If Q.Count Mod 2 = 0 Then
Do
changeTest = False
J = 2
Do While J <= Q.Count
If (Q(J - 1) = 34 And Q(J) = 34) Or _
(Q(J - 1) = 147 And Q(J) = 148) Then
Q.Remove J
Q.Remove J - 1
changeTest = True
J = 2
Else
J = J + 1
End If
Loop
Loop While changeTest
End If

If Q.Count > 0 Then
Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
i = i + 1
End If
Selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
Selection.Find.Execute
Wend
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
MsgBox i & " paragraphs contain mismatched quotes"
End Sub

I just wanted to thank you SO MUCH for this macro. A computer-savvy friend helped me install it, and it works like a charm.

As an editor, I can vouch for the fact that missing quotation marks is one of the easiest things to miss when correcting a document. I absolutely love this software, and it is the first thing I run on a document.

Thanks again.

As an editor for fiction books, I find this one of the easiest things to miss and also wish for software that would provide, at least, a basic check. I did not know what you meant by smart quotes and non-smart quotes. Can you provide a link to a reference on this?

I am a writer, not a computer nerd, so the suggestion I insert a macro somewhere is way beyond my competence.

Is there not a program or app I could run?

"Pages" in Apple has it. It even will show things like my keyboard flipping over to French and changing the mark in don't to an accent. It will even show if you not only left it off the front or back end it will pick up you missing fully hitting the shift key and just leaving a (') I totally have transferred all my manuscript over just to check on this.

Thank you for this information and explanation. I'll set up a macro and run it for each chapter.
Sincerely,
David