Oh I didn ' t mean light as in he doesn ' t weigh , I meant like he bites light . But yeah dogs take after the owners so shitty ownershitty dog unfortunately . <| sep |> In handwritten text , pretypewriter , a quotation was begun with an opening quotation mark like tiny curves , convex on the left , with a thicker part or a circular part on the bottom and closed with the opposite tiny curves , convex to the right , with a thicker or circular part at the top . When typewriters started being produced , the number of symbols they could create was limited for mechanical reasons , so both kinds of marks were represented by a pair of vertical ticks , thicker at the top . Early computer keyboards developed from even earlier teletype keyboards , which evolved from those typewriters . When the various maps of symbolstobinarycodes that computers used including EBCDIC and ASCII , the typewriter quotemark was encoded as one character there as well . Now that computers and printers are more capable and we have symbol sets like Unicode that support them , we can go back to the prettier style of marks . but keyboards still only have the one kind . Smart quotes are just a way for writing software to guess whether you want opening or closing quotation marks in your text , based on position and a few simple rules . When you type the single usedforboth quote key on your keyboard , the software substitutes the properlyshaped Unicode quotation mark instead . They ' re not inherently better . Some people find them more aesthetically pleasing is all . In fact , some publishers actively don ' t want them in manuscripts , because they prefer to handle their own typesetting decisions .