With regard to quotation marks adjacent to periods and commas, there are two styles of punctuation in widespread use. Despite being semantically different, the typographic closing single quotation mark and the typographic apostrophe have the same visual appearance and code point (U+2019), as do the neutral single quote and typewriter apostrophe (U+0027). Never use single quotation marks in sentences like the previous three.
In these cases, questions arise about the form spinorhino casino (and names) of the quotation marks to be used. In Early Modern English, quotation marks were used to denote pithy comments. Because typewriter and computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much of typed writing has neutral quotation marks. Typographic quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text. Single quotation marks are valid only within a quotation, as per Rule 7, above. Put the title of a short work—one that is or could be part of a larger undertaking—in quotation marks.
Poland, adopted a variant with the convexity of the closing mark aimed rightward like the opening one, „…”. Some neighboring regions adopted the German curved marks tradition with lower–upper alignment, while some, e.g. Some authors claim that the reason for this was a practical one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from apostrophes, commas, and parentheses.
Other rules for quotation marks
- Use quotation marks to represent speech in written text.
- In Early Modern English, quotation marks were used to denote pithy comments.
- Short quotations can generally be run in to the main text using quotation marks.
- Typographic quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text.
- Thus, in at least some cases, transferring content containing curved quotes (or any other non-ASCII characters) from a word processor to another application or platform has been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) are Unicode-aware.
- On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic adopted the French “angular” quotation marks, «…».
- In this case, it is necessary to set the translation off with commas.
The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly quotation marks. All other forms of quotation marks, such as angled, lowered, inverted, were not provided by British or American typewriters. When corner brackets are being used for quotations, quote-within-quote segments are marked with white corner brackets. Neither the Portuguese language regulator nor the Brazilian prescribe a particular shape for quotation marks, they only prescribe when and how they should be used.
- (For additional characters used in other languages, see Quotation mark § Summary table.)
- The American style is used by most newspapers, publishing houses, and style guides in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada as well.
- Use quotation marks to draw attention to words or language in your writing.
- According to the Jargon File from 1983, American hackers (members of a subculture of enthusiastic programmers) switched to what they later discovered to be the British quotation system because placing a period inside a quotation mark can change the meaning of data strings that are meant to be typed character-for-character.
- Quotation marks are also used to indicate the titles of creative works and highlight specific terms or phrases, often emphasizing tone.
Non-language-related usage
They also require the proper context so the reader understands why the writer doubts or is qualifying the word’s usage. In fiction, they’re used for writing dialogue or whenever a character says something out loud. This is most common in nonfiction writing when a writer uses a phrase or sentence from a preexisting source, usually to support their thesis.
Certain types of works—but not all—use quotation marks around their titles so the reader knows the work is a reference. Below, we list the seven main uses for quotation marks. It helps to break down the rules for when to use quotation marks by their function.
In Australia, double quotes are preferred for indicating speech, except in the government and corporate sectors, where the preference is for single quotes. The typographic closing double quotation mark and the neutral double quotation mark are similar to – and sometimes stand in for – the ditto mark and the double prime symbol. Opening and closing quotation marks may be identical in form (called neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, or “dumb” quotation marks), or may be distinctly left-handed and right-handed (typographic or, colloquially, curly quotation marks); see Quotation mark § Summary table for details. Although the word is the same, “Camelot” the song takes quotation marks because it’s part of a larger work—namely, a full-length show called Camelot. Periods and commas ALWAYS go inside quotation marks.
By contrast, American English typically uses double quotation marks to identify the outermost text of a primary quotation versus single quotation marks for inner, nested quotations. British English often uses single quotation marks to identify the outermost text of a primary quotation versus double quotation marks for inner, nested quotations. When dealing with direct speech, according to the British style guide Butcher’s Copy-editing, if a quotation is broken by words of the main sentence, and then resumed, the punctuation before the break should follow the closing quote unless it forms part of the quotation. Whether these are single or double depends on the context; however, many styles, especially for poetry, prefer the use of single quotation marks. While American style has periods and commas going inside single and double quotation marks, question marks follow logic.
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“The best investments today”, according to Smith, “are commodities and emerging-market stocks”. “The best investments today,” according to Smith, “are commodities and emerging-market stocks.” Find the quotation you need on our sister site funnyQuotation.com. (2) Quotation marks to signify so-called or alleged (4) To show that a word refers to the word itself not the word’s meaning.
The angle shape was introduced later to make them easier to distinguish from apostrophes, commas and parentheses in handwritten manuscripts submitted to publishers. French news sites such as Libération, Les Échos and Le Figaro do not add manual spacing, leaving it up to localization and the browser to space the guillemets properly. This style of quoting is also used in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene and in Ukrainian. Verdana, were not designed with the flexibility to use an English left quote as a German right quote. It is also similar to—and often used to represent—the double prime symbol. Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.
Period
Also note that, as a courtesy, there is visible space between adjacent single and double quotation marks. Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations. If a question is within the quoted material, a question mark should be placed inside the quotation marks. Less commonly, single quotation marks are used in place of parentheses, in which case the translation is not set off with commas. Because the quoted material is set off from the main text, it is not necessary to use quotation marks.
But there are still applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur. This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. A quotation dash is also used, and is predominant in belletristic literature.
However, most computer text-editing programs provide a “smart quotes” feature to automatically convert straight quotation marks into bidirectional punctuation, though sometimes imperfectly (see § Smart quotes). Standard English computer keyboard layouts inherited the single and double straight quotation marks from the typewriter (the single quotation mark also doubling as an apostrophe), and they do not include individual keys for left-handed and right-handed typographic quotation marks. Straight single and double quotation marks are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters, collectively known as string literals. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility may suggest that a thin space ( ) or larger non-breaking space ( ) be inserted. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other punctuation within the sentence, such as a colon or closing punctuation.
In Finnish and Swedish, right quotes, called citation marks, ”…”, are used to mark both the beginning and the end of a quote. In Central Europe, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity aimed inward. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity of each mark aimed outward. (For additional characters used in other languages, see Quotation mark § Summary table.) Prime and double prime are not present in most code pages, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 ′ PRIME and U+2033 ″ DOUBLE PRIME.
The double quotation mark is identical to the ditto mark in English-language usage. The Far East angle bracket quotation marks, 《…》, are also a development of the in-line angular quotation marks.citation needed On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic adopted the French “angular” quotation marks, «…». This was considered aesthetically unpleasing, while the in-line quotation marks helped to maintain the typographical color, since the quotation marks had the same height and were aligned with the lower case letters. In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo marked literal and appropriate quotes with oblique double dashes on the left margin of each line. The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage.