no-fancy-asciilisted

# No fancy ASCII A person types what is on their keyboard. Curly quotes, middle dots, ellipsis glyphs, and little arrow symbols mostly appear when text was generated by a model or run through a formatter that "prettifies" punctuation. So when a reader sees them, the writing feels machine-made, even when the words are good. Plain keyboard characters read as written by a human. The rule: if you would not produce the character by pressing one key (or an obvious Shift combo) on a normal keyboard, do not put it in prose. ## Replace these | Fancy | Use instead | | --- | --- | | `“ ” ‘ ’` smart quotes | straight `"` and `'` | | `…` ellipsis glyph | three periods `...` | | `·` middle dot, `•` bullet | reword, a comma, a period, or a plain `-`; for real lists use list markup | | `→ ← ▸ ▶ ▼ ► » «` arrows/guillemets | drop them, use a real icon/SVG, or plain text | | `–` en dash, `—` em dash | see the `no-em-dashes` skill | | `′ ″` primes used as quotes | straight `'` and `"` | | `×` used as "x" or "by" in prose | `x` or the word `by` | | non-breaking space, zero-width space, soft hyphen | a normal space, or nothing | ## Keep these These are not ornaments, so leave them alone: - Letters a language needs: `İ ı ş ğ ç ö ü`, accented Latin, and any non-Latin script. Stripping these breaks the words. - Currency: `₺ € £ ¥ $`. - `© ® ™` where they are genuinely standard, such as a footer copyright line. - Emoji, when it is a deliberate voice choice the user wants. - Any symbol a code