Normalize Quotes, Dashes & Ellipses

Paste your text into a typography normalizer like CleanPastedText. Typography normalization is on in the default 'AI Clean' preset, as well as in 'Safe Clean' and 'Plain ASCII', so it works without changing any settings. It matches every curly variant — left and right double quotes (U+201C, U+201D) and single quotes (U+2018, U+2019) — and replaces them with the straight ASCII equivalents. En dashes, em dashes, and ellipsis characters are converted in the same pass.

Programming languages only accept the straight ASCII quote characters as string delimiters. A curly quote (U+201D) pasted from Word or a chat app looks nearly identical but is a different code point, so the parser throws a syntax error like 'unexpected token'. Because the difference is almost invisible, normalizing quotes before pasting into an editor is the reliable fix.

The hyphen (U+002D) is the ASCII character on your keyboard, used to join words. The en dash (U+2013) is wider and marks ranges like 2020–2024. The em dash (U+2014) is widest and sets off clauses — like this. Word processors auto-convert typed hyphens into the fancier dashes, which is what a normalizer reverses.

Large language models learned from published prose, where em dashes are common, so models like ChatGPT use them far more often than typical human typists — enough that heavy em dash use has become a well-known AI tell. Normalizing dashes to plain hyphens removes the typographic signature, though it does not change the wording itself.

Yes. Choose the 'Keep Typography' preset in the cleaner: it still strips invisible characters, directional marks, and non-standard spaces, but leaves curly quotes, dashes, and ellipses exactly as they are. That's the right mode when your publication's style guide requires typographic punctuation.