Quotation marks in annotations

I apologize if this is a foolish question. I am an ELAN noob. I am using version 5.0.0 on a Mac to transcribe audio from a podcast. Whenever I make a new annotation, ELAN automatically inserts a quotation mark at the beginning of the text. Is there a purpose for these quotation marks? I did some searching and could not figure out if they are necessary for something. I have been deleting them, but I am also wondering if there is a way to turn off this automatic insertion.

Since ELAN does not deliberately insert any character in any new annotation, I assume that this is a side effect of using a keyboard combination to create a new annotation (in combination with some system defined behavior of a modifier key).
If that is indeed the case and you use the default Option+N keyboard shortcut, I would advise to change the shortcut to a different combination. See also this thread:
https://tla.mpi.nl/topic/new-annotation-here-bug/

-Han

Thanks so much Han! You are completely right. I could not tell that it was a tilde because of the screen resolution, so I did not search for the right terms to find out about the existing discussion of this issue. I will follow your suggestion!