Words that must not be spoken

[Jim Hurley]

I have just moved over to a Macbook Air running OS X 10.9

I have a utility that I have long used for proofreading. I click on a word of text, and RR begins to read from that point on. (Great for distinguishing between references to the  "Public Defender" or the  "Pubic Defender.")

It has run well in all versions of LC, but now balks at any text containing an apostrophe or quote and perhaps other characters that I haven't yet explored. It won't even *begin* to speak text containing these characters. But it will speak that same text if I remove just those offending characters. 

Is there a language setting in the Mac preferences that I need to change to make the text agreeable to revspeak?

Thanks,

Jim