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>Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotati

>Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes. >I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect. Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/ http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/ It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available. Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote. I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.

lostlogin 5y ago
You have just given me flashbacks of using a keyboard in Italy to type in English. I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
Sbuu 5y ago
In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout. Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized. I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.

lostlogin 5y ago

You have just given me flashbacks of using a keyboard in Italy to type in English. I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.

Sbuu 5y ago

In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.

Thorrez 5y ago
I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout. Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized. I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.