Random question marks in post

have you tried:
-deactivating ALL plugins (yes, all) temporarily to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate them individually (one-by-one) to find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try deactivating via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides. If applicible, also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old.
– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems (because the hooks remain unless plugins completely removed or some plugins stick around in cached files. So by renaming the folder, you break them and force them inactive).
– To rule out any theme-specific issue, try switching to the unedited default Twenty Twelve theme for a moment using the WP dashboard. If you don’t have access to your admin area, you can switch to the default theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides.

This isn’t an issue with plugins, theme or anything else.

It’s a well-known issue where Word puts in a lot of it’s own meta information as well as uisng a few non-standard chracters for things like quote mark, dashes, end of line characters, delimiters, etc…

As much as it’s double-handling, when you’re copy-and-paste’ing from Word, you have to paste the text into a very basic text deitor like Notepad first, look it over and check for any issues with it, and then cut-and-paste from Notepad into the WordPress editor area. As you’ve seen there is the ‘Paste from Word’ icon, but I don’t trust that 100% so I would suggest avoiding that unless there’s no alternative. As you’ve seen it doesn’t always clean up Words mess.

Well you were right catacaustic – it wasn’t plugins etc – thank goodness. It was the formatting. I did as you said and it seems ok now – thank you.

As a matter of interest – I have notepad on my PC and just tried to find it to download to my new laptop but could only find notepad++ which I don’t particularly like. Is the old version no longer available do you know??

Many thanks

Janet

Notepad is part of the standard Windows install, so I’ve never had to go looking for it to download before. I’m not usre what version of Windows you’re running there, but I have to admit that I haven’t used Windows 8 yet so I don’t know if it’s on there, but I know that it’s on every version from 7 down. It may not be in your menu system, but i twill be there. If you do a search on your PC there you’ll find it somewhere.

Notepad++ is a different thing. It’s not an official Microsoft product and is mainly geared towards developers that want a light-weight but functioning code editor, so it’s not something that I’d advise you to get for something like this unless you have some other reaosn for needing it.