this is obvious for e.g. possessives and contractions but i was surprised that it also applies to omission of letters/numbers at the start of a word, particularly when abbreviating year numbers (e.g. 2024 -> '24)
this honestly doesn't feel really intuitive to me, probably because i've seen it done wrong far more times than i've seen it done correctly. i suspect this might be because microsoft word will sometimes assume youre starting a pair of single quotes and insert the wrong type. idk
WARNING: tangent
i guess it doesn't help that unicode/ascii has 0x27 "apostrophe" to represent both single quotes and apostrophes. probably a similar situation to 0x2D "hyphen-minus" (which i hate WAY more) to save on unnecessary encoding work and space back in the day (and on keyboards) but i feel at this point no one really cares about using the right type of dash, and arguably unless you're really obsessed with details like me it won't really matter. though i will say, whenever i'm taking notes, i will always use en dashes for ranges, and i do encounter a lot of ranges in medicine (e.g. "nonunion 0–6 mo, pseudarthrosis >6 mo"). it does help that the mac keyboard has a really simple way of typing all three dashes (- for hyphen-minus, alt+- for en dash, shift+alt+- for em dash), but... oh well