Everyone talks about the em dash vs. hyphen problem, but there's a second, more subtle punctuation giveaway: your quotation marks.

Look at these two sentences:

1. She said, “I’ll be there soon.”
2. She said, "I'll be there soon."

The first sentence uses “smart quotes” (also called curly quotes). They are typographically correct and used in books and magazines.

The second sentence uses "straight quotes". They are the default marks on a computer keyboard.

Just like with dashes, AIs are trained on "published" text, so they output "published" smart quotes. Humans, on the other hand, just type the straight quotes from their keyboard.

Why Smart Quotes Are a Problem

AI detectors and plagiarism checkers are programs. They are very good at spotting patterns. When a professor or a detector scans a document and sees that 100% of the quotes are "typographically perfect" smart quotes, it's a quiet signal.

It suggests the text wasn't *typed* by a person on a deadline, but *generated* by a machine that defaults to "book" formatting.

Most AI humanizers and rewriters *still* output smart quotes, which is a key reason they still get flagged.

---

The "Final Polish" for Your Quotes

To make your text truly "human-typed," you need to convert all "smart" punctuation back to "keyboard" punctuation. This is a crucial step in what we call the 3-step punctuation check.

• Convert all “ ” (smart quotes) to " " (straight quotes).
• Convert all ‘ ’ (smart single quotes) to ' ' (straight single quotes).

Our Punctuation Chameleon tool does this automatically. The "Humanize AI" mode is built to hunt down these "fancy" quotes and replace them with the "human-typed" straight quotes instantly.