In Windows, if it is necessary to follow a space with a closing quotation mark when Smart Quotes is in effect, it is usually sufficient to input the character using the Alt code shown above rather than typing ” or ‘. Straight quotation marks are also retronymically called dumb quotes (“…”). There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. In journals and newspapers, quotation mark double/single use often depends on the individual publication’s house style. British usage does vary, with some authoritative sources such as The Economist and The Times recommending the same usage as in the US, whereas other authoritative sources, such as The King’s English, Fowler’s, and New Hart’s Rules, recommend single quotation marks. For example, the journal Language of the Linguistic Society of America requires that the closing quotation mark precede the period or comma unless that period or comma is “a necessary part of the quoted matter”.
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.
American style
There is no space on the internal side of quote marks, with the exception of 1⁄4 firet (≈ 1⁄4 em) space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them (e.g. ,„ and ’”). Unlike English, French does not identify unquoted material within a quotation by using a second set of quotation marks. French uses angle quotation marks (guillemets, or duck-foot quotes), adding a ‘quarter-em space’a within the quotes. British publishing is regarded as more flexible about whether double or single quotation marks should be used. If another set of quotation marks is nested inside single quotation marks, double quotation marks are used again, and they continue to alternate as necessary (though this is rarely done).
German
In American English, punctuation marks are typically placed inside quotation marks, with some exceptions. Quotation marks come in pairs, with an opening quotation mark at the beginning and a closing one at the end of the quote. If you want to discuss a word, phrase, or letter in writing without using its intended meaning, set it apart with quotation marks. Chicago style uses quotation marks for titles of shorter works, such as poems, articles, and chapters, but uses italics for books and periodical titles. AP style uses quotation marks for titles of creative works like books, movies, songs, TV shows, and other compositions. Use quotation marks to represent speech in written text.
- Short quotations can generally be run in to the main text using quotation marks.
- In Early Modern English, quotation marks were used to denote pithy comments.
- Use quotation marks to represent speech in written text.
- In this case, it is necessary to set the translation off with commas.
- On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic adopted the French “angular” quotation marks, «…».
- 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.
Here, we explain the must-know guidelines for proper quotation mark usage, including examples for each. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. “Smart quotes” features wrongly convert initial apostrophes (as in ’tis, ’em, ’til, and ’89) into opening single quotes. Performance by these “smart quotes” features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits). Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using. In Finnish, the beginning of a reporting clause is marked only by the punctuation already existing in the sentence, or (if there was none) by adding a comma.
If the question mark or exclamation mark is not part of the quote but part of a question or statement, place it outside the quotation marks. If the question mark or exclamation mark is part of the quote, place it inside the quotation marks. Place the period inside the quotation marks when a quotation comes at the end of a sentence. Place both parts of the quote within their own set of quotation marks. Because you want to attach the speaker to their dialogue, use a comma rather than a period to end the quote inside the quotation marks. In British English, punctuation marks are placed outside the quotation marks unless they are part of the original quotation.
Writing about letters and words
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.
Quotation marks and adjacent punctuation
(These exceptions are ignored by some Asian computer systems that systematically display quotation marks with the included spacing, as this spacing is part of the fixed-width characters.) A convention is the use of square brackets to indicate content between the quotation marks that has been modified from, or was not present in, the original material. In many cases, quotations that span multiple paragraphs are set as block quotations, and thus do not require quotation marks.
Using a breakable space of any kind often results in a quotation mark appearing alone at the beginning of a line, since the quotation mark is erroneously treated as an independent word. Even more commonly, many people put a normal (breaking) space inside the quotation markscitation needed because the non-breaking space cannot be accessed easily from the keyboard, or because they are not aware of this typographical refinement. Alternatively, an en-dash followed by a (non-breaking) space can be used to denote the beginning of quoted speech, in which case the end of the quotation is not specifically denoted (see section Quotation dash below). Although not generally common in the Netherlands any more, double angle (guillemet) quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. The King’s English in 1908 noted that the prevailing British practice was to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations within quotations.
- This usage can be confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation, sometimes with unintended humor.
- 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.
- Quotation marks are often used with technical terms, terms used in an unusual way, or other expressions that vary from standard usage.
- In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the curved quotation marks, „…“, are used as a secondary level or in handwriting, while the angular marks, «…», are used as the primary level on printed text.citation needed
- (1) To identify previously spoken or written words.
- 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.
Quotes indicating verbal irony, or other special use, are sometimes called scare quotes. If such a passage is further quoted in another publication, then all of their forms have to be shifted up by one level. Sometimes quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation. They were used to quote direct speech as early as the late sixteenth century, and this practice became more common over time.
In non-fiction, some British publishers may permit placing punctuation that is not part of the person’s speech inside the quotation marks but prefer that it be placed outside. When quoted text is interrupted, such as with the phrase he said, a closing quotation mark is used before the interruption, and an opening quotation mark after. Likewise, the typographic opening single quotation mark is sometimes used to represent the ʻokina while either the typographic closing single quotation mark or the neutral single quotation mark may represent the prime symbol.
An indirect quote lets you capture or summarize what someone said or wrote without using their exact words. Quotation marks are a type of punctuation with several different functions. This convention was later standardized in RFC 3676, and was adopted subsequently by many email clients when automatically including quoted text from previous messages (in plain text mode). For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as the generic replacement character � or “mojibake” (gibberish).
They signal the use of someone else’s words to help distinguish between the source’s voice and the quoted material. Several other Unicode characters with quotation mark semantics lack the character property. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use “ and ”, and to represent single curly quotes use ‘ and ’. There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. Historically, support for curved quotes was a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them.f
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.
Quotation marks are also used to indicate the titles of creative works and highlight specific terms or phrases, often emphasizing tone. Quotation marks have many essential functions in grammar. While using numeric references can make a page more compatible with outdated browsers, using named references are safer for systems that handle multiple character encodings (i.e. spinorhino casino RSS aggregators and search results). In addition, while the HTML 4, XHTML and XML specifications allow specifying numeric character references in either hexadecimal or decimal, SGML and older versions of HTML (and many old implementations) only support decimal references. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can cause difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding.