Question

I keep getting ? characters in my Blackboard discussion posts. Why are those appearing?

Answer

The funny ? characters are a result of the Blackboard text editor not recognizing special characters, such as smart quotes. By default Microsoft Word has smart quotes turned on. Smart quotes are usually curved in shape and have different opening and closing versions. Straight quotes are usually simple tapered vertical or angled marks.

If a document in Word is using the default "smart quotes" feature, Word replaces regular quotation marks and apostrophes with smart quotes. A similar setting changes hyphens to a dash and three periods to a more evenly spaced ellipsis.
 
When text with the special formatting is pasted into Blackboard, the text editor converts the formatting to HTML to be viewed on the web. The text editor can't figure out what the smart quotes and other characters are, so it replaces the "character" with a question mark.
 
Workaround:
If you do a lot of copy/pasting from Word, then you can turn off the "smart quotes" feature.
 
In Word, go to the Tools menu and select AutoCorrect Options. Click on the "Format as you Type" tab. In the Replace as you Type section, uncheck the "Straight quotes" and the hyphen boxes.
 
You could also copy text from Notepad or another text editor instead of Microsoft Word.