You Can Quote Me: “Quotation Marks are Confusing.”

The proper use of quotation marks in writing.

DRM
What To Do About…Everything

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There’s a difference between quotation marks (those little airborne commas) and quotations themselves. Seems like it should be intuitive, but based on what I see as a copy editor, it isn’t.

Quotation marks have a surprising number of different names: quotes, quote marks, speech marks, talk or talking marks, 66/99 marks, flying commas, inverted commas — I even referred to them as “airborne commas”. One of the biggest points of confusion seems to be that the marks themselves and the text blocks they set off are both called quotes.

Quotation Marks

Quotation marks are only sold in sets; there is no proper use of a single pair of open (“) or closed (”) quote marks. Quotation marks are used to indicate that something is special about the text inside the marks.

The text may be a direct quote of someone else’s words; it may indicate that the text is dialogue (more common in fiction than in nonfiction), or that the word or words inside the quotation marks is being used in a manner different from the word’s strict definition.

  • Cats are often “talkative” around people.

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DRM
What To Do About…Everything

Writer/editor in science, society, environment, and mental health. Also personal essays. And some random weirdness. https://debram315.medium.com/subscribe