Using 'curly quotes'

Using 'curly quotes'

by Amanda Hopkins -
Number of replies: 11

Moodle 3.0.

I've had Moodle thrust upon me without any chance for discussion about whether it's suitable for the course for which I'm creating support materials, but I'm pretty computer literate (and can, if needs be, fight my way round HTML, for example, if not always very elegantly) and, largely thanks to Mr Singh's amazing Moodle manual, I have started making convincing headway on the basics.

The course is supposed to introduce first-year undergraduates at a UK university to aspects of academic writing, one of which is using the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) manual. The powers-that-be are keen to have a quiz on the course, to make sure students are accessing the online materials and understanding some of the trickier and set requirements. (Taking the quiz will be a 'monitoring point', and thus a requirement, although the course itself is not taken for credits.)

What I'd hoped to do (before I met Moodle) as a key part of testing students' understanding of the referencing style was to present some jpgs of references in various other styles or with errors in them, which the students would then recast (or correct) into an MHRA reference.

So far, so good — except that the citation style (like the majority, I'd guess) uses so-called 'curly quotes' (both single ’ ‘ and double “ ”) as standard and so, while I can present examples correctly in the instructions using HTML codes, neither I nor technical support can find a way to have the students' input show the quotation marks correctly.

This may prove to be problematic — I have visions of students switching off their 'smart quotes' in Word because the quiz has led them to think it's wrong! — but I'm reluctant to have a plain multiple-choice 'which is right?' quiz either, as it seems to demand far less thought on the students' part and be far less useful as an exercise on the way to 'live' usage of the citation system, incorrect use of which may well affect their marks.

If any has any ideas or knows of a plug-in that can accommodate this issue, I'd be very grateful. I am fulling expecting the answer 'No', but nothing ventured, nothing gained…

If you've read this far, thank you for your time.

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Marcus Green -
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What question types are you using, is it the short answer type? (I probably don't know the answer to your question but this additional information might help others to find it)

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Amanda Hopkins -

Thanks for your reply. The answer to your question is: probably, but I didn't include it as I hadn't made a final decision. It seemed pointless to make a concrete choice about this, and to start to take the quiz off paper plan, until I discovered in broad whether or not the whole thing was going to be a waste of time, or – alternatively – whether a specific quiz type might accommodate the requirement.

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Marcus Green -
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The most common type of question to use for long form text is the essay question type. However the drawback of this is that it is not automatically marked. However there is rarely a satisfactory way of automatically marking long text form questions anyway. Are you anticipating giving out questions that are automatically marked?

It might help if you could post the text or an image of the type of question you are likely to be asking. 

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Amanda Hopkins -

It's not actually a *question* at all, but a reformatting into a prescribed referencing style, and it certainly needs to be automatically marked as there will be a lot of students and equally various different kinds of references!

I thought the short-answer form would be appropriate as it's a fairly short text and there is only one possible right answer (the one that adheres precisely to the prescribed style guide), meaning that the students' input is either right or wrong — but it cannot ever be right if the students cannot input the correct quotation marks.

For instance, the students would be show the attached graphic and asked to recast the reference into an MHRA-style bibliographical entry. The single correct answer (and the hanging indent, also required of the students, is another whole set of headaches, which I don't plan even to starting thinking about until and unless I resolve the quotation mark issue!) would be as follows:

Britzolakis, Christina, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, in Angela Carter, ed. by Alison Easton (London: MacMillan, 2000), pp. 173–91

where the article title shows ‘…’ not '…', and the answer would either be right or it would not — but it would *never* be right with 'straight quotes'.

(Just as an aside to my main problem, but in response to your response, would this actually be too long for a short-form answer then?)

Attachment Convert to MHRA style 1.jpg
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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Marcus Green -
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Would it be considered an incorrect answer if it contained a spurious space, e.g. 


Britzolakis, Christina, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, in Angela Carter, ed. by Alison Easton (London: MacMillan, 2000), pp.  173–91

At the moment I am thinking the easiest approach is a multiple choice with 3 incorrect and 1 correct formulation. It might also be easiest/necessary to have images rather than text to be compared. Off the top of my head I don't know about the length. Have you experimented with Moodle questions at all. You can get an up to date free account at MoodleCloud (you have to be willing to receive a text message but it is purely for id/spam avoidance)

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In reply to Marcus Green

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Amanda Hopkins -

Would it be considered an incorrect answer if it contained a spurious space

Yes, it would.

As I said before, a passive quiz method (multiple choice) is no use for this exercise, as the students need to learn how to formulate the references for themselves, not guess at answers. (I tried a multiple choice approach some years ago on paper with science students, and found that on average over half of them tended simply to guess randomly.)

I'm now trying to find out about other, hopefully more advanced, software options to accommodate this exercise, which I must admit I had thought – clearly naively, as it's turned out! – was an excellent candidate for a digital-based test because of its very precision.

Ho hum.

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Emma Richardson -
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Way back when, I used to use Hot Potatoes to create my quizzes.  There was an option in Hot Potatoes to create special keys for certain characters.  I used them for Spanish accents and tildes but you could maybe use them for the curly quotes.  It creates a button at the bottom of the page that they click on to insert the quote marks.

I am presuming this still works and be imported into moodle with the hot potato plugin but honestly, it has been a few years since I used it.  

Just a thought...

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by AL Rachels -
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No, it is not too long for a short answer question type answer. The problem is that your answers uses two lines and the answer box for a short answer type question is just one line. And, unfortunately, since it doesn't have editor tools, my other idea about using the Insert Character tool button won't work with short answer questions.

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Tim Hunt -
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First can I say that your instincts are right. Questions where students input their own response test students in a fundamentally different way form multiple choice, and there is research literature about that. 'Selected response' and 'Constructed response' is probably the jargon to search for.

I understand your dilemma about quotes, but there is an added dimension. When it comes to what you type, to get a curly quote in MS Word, you just press the " key. Word then does some clever heuristics to work out if it should be a right or left quote, and substitutes the right character. Students don't need to do anything special. They just need to verify that word got it right. Therefore, if you think about the Moodle questions in terms of what students have to type, then straight quotes could be fine. It might be OK to handle this with a covering note at the start of the quiz ("In this quiz, we will accept either " or ”, but when it comes to your essays, you will be expected to get this right, but your word processor should do that for you. See sections 1.2.3 of this course for more information.")

Another alternative is to teach students the arcane keyboard shortcuts for curly quotes (http://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html) but it seems silly to teach that just so they can interact with Moodle. They don't really need to know it.

Another alternative is to ensure there are always curly quote characters in the question text which students can copy and paste, but again that is the technology getting in the way.

After all, whether the quotes are curly or straight is probably the least interesting part of doing a reference. Getting the author name right, and the title and journal in the right order is more important an more interesting - Aha! so, one compromise would be to look at the Drag and drop into text question type. That will let you use italics inside the drag items. That is selected response, but with many more possible answers than a simple multiple choice.

Another approach is to use Moodle's short-answer question type, and use the feature than you can have multiple right answers, each with different feedback, so you would set it up something like:

Answer 1: Proper “curly” quotes - Grade: 100%
Feedback: That is exactly right.

Answer 2: Proper "curly" quotes - Grade: 100%
Feedback: That is right. Note, we have given you full credit, even though you used straight quotes because of the difficulty of typing them into Moodle. Remember to check that curly quotes have been used when you type your essays in Word.

Answer 3: * - Grade 0%
Feedback: You answer is not right. You may wish to re-read section 1.2.3 of the course.

(Note, in the short-answer question type, * means 'match anything', so that feedback will be given if they student types any wrong answer.)

I realise that none of those suggestions are perfect, but hopefully there is something you can work with there. The corresponding benefit is that Moodle can give students their feedback immediately, which can really help learning.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by Amanda Hopkins -

That's given me *lots* to think about, and some useful ways of flagging the matter of 'curly' versus 'straight' marks. Many thanks.

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In reply to Amanda Hopkins

Re: Using 'curly quotes'

by AL Rachels -
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There  is already a plugin on the Atto toolbar that should give you the characters you want...Insert Character. Just need to show your students where it is and how to use...both pretty simple. Unfortunately, this would probably only work for an essay type question since you need the editor toolbar to be visible.

If the editor is visible, then of course you could also duplicate one of the other "editor" tools, e.g. Chemistry Editor, Computer Science, Mathslate, etc. and make it into a MHRA editor.

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