You can draft your writing in dialog boxes in your browser. A lot of websites (including WdC) have options where you can preview your work, save drafts, and/or make items private until you've

You can manually go through your document and change all of your quotation marks. If you only have a little bit of formatting, it's a relatively minor change to make and it's generally a good idea to proofread your work anyway. So when you copy and paste something from another program, just take a look at the finished product and fix any places where the coding gets wonky. Since you know what to look for, it shouldn't be too hard or take too long to fix the errors.

For Writing.Com in particular, the new functionality that allows you to drag-and-drop Word documents onto the Create New Item screen will take care of all the formatting for you. Just drag the item, drop it, and tell it to convert the formatting to WritingML. It'll convert everything for you automatically. The only downside is that this feature is only for creating new items; it won't work if you're copying and pasting into other areas of the site such as forum posts or blog entries.

You can turn off smart quotes in your word processor. In Microsoft Word, there's a check box in the AutoCorrect settings that allow you to turn them on and off. In Google Docs, that same check box is in the Preferences settings under the Tools menu. In Pages, look under Substitutions area of the Edit menu. This will get rid of smart quotes altogether, which makes the dumb quotes you use directly transferrable to any web browser or site you're using. The downside to this solution is that it's a global change that affects all documents ... so you'll have to turn smart quotes back on when you want to use them in other documents.

If you have multiple word processing programs, you can use one specifically for web-based writing and documents where you need to weave coding and words together, and another program where you can keep the smart quote default for your other writing. For example, maybe you use Pages for your regular writing and Google Docs for your writing that needs "dumb quotes." Or you can use Microsoft Word for your "smart quotes" writing and TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad/Wordpad (PC) for your coding-catered work. By simply having two different word processing programs, you can customize each one for the task you need. And if you're looking for another word processor, you can even download Open Office, a completely free alternative to Microsoft Office, here: http://www.openoffice.org.

You can switch your smart quotes feature on and off, then do a find and replace for all the quotation marks. The programs won't usually go through and change the quotation marks you've already made; they'll just change them from that point going forward. So, in Google Docs for example, you can write your document with smart quotes, then go turn smart quotes off. Do a find for all single quotes (') and replace with another single quote ('), then do another find for all double quotes (") and replace with another double quote ("). That'll turn all of your smart quotes to dumb quotes ... then you just turn smart quotes back on.