Background:
We strongly recommend that users compose lengthy answers for a forum post or other assignment in Microsoft Word or another text editor and save it locally before submitting to Blackboard assignment or Discussion Forum areas. Once this text is saved, users may choose to copy and paste it into the text edit box for their assignment but may find that the resulting post substitutes question marks in for some commonly used punctuation characters like quotation marks.

Cause:
Currently the Blackboard system does not support "curly" quotes, apostrophes, semicolons, and certain other special characters such as those used in Microsoft Word.

Suggested Workaround:
Blackboard's suggested workaround is to set your word processing program to type "straight" quotes, apostrophes, semicolons, etc. or alternately to retype these particular characters once they have been pasted into a Blackboard textbox.