Let’s just do a quick run-down on how you use quotation marks, shall we? (American-style, that is–I know some of these rules are different with British usage, but can only speak for American-English.)
- Simply put–and it should be redundant–quotation marks are used for quotations. If you are quoting some of my many words of wisdom, you should put them in quotes. “Quotation marks are used for quotations.”
If you are paraphrasing–not quoting me directly–you do not need the quotes.
- Block quotes (those idented paragraphs usually used for quotations of four lines or more) do not require quotation marks.
- The first word in a quotation should be capitalized. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.“
- If you are writing dialogue and interrupting your quote, you do not need to capitalize the second half of the sentence. “Golly gee,” he said breathlessly, “that’s just swell, Mary Jo!“
- As a general rule (there are always exceptions), if your quotation is a full sentence, all punctuation should be inside the quote marks. “She sells seashells by the seashore.” This particularly applies to periods and commas.
- Punctation such as exclamation points, Question marks, dashes–these go inside or outside the quotes depending on whether the quote or the sentence “using” the quote is the exclamation or question.
For example: Then I shouted, “You’re burning the toast!” has the exclamation point inside the quotes because it was the quoted shout that had the exclamation.
Whereas Turn up the radio! They’re playing “Stupid Cupid”! has the exclamation point outside the quotes because it’s not the song title that has the “!” but the actual sentence that is being exclaimed.
- If your quote is only part of your sentence, the punctuation belongs outside. As in: Don’t ever forget the maxim, “Loose Lips Sink Ships”.
- When you have a quote inside of a quote, you should use single quotes: “Then he said to me, ‘Mary Jo, that’s just swell,’ can you imagine?”
This, of course, is not meant to be a complete list of all possible uses of quotation marks. In fact, I know that it’s incomplete. What did I not tell you that you’d like to know about? Is there anything I said that wasn’t clear? Let me know!
And, looking forward, are there any particular topics for Mangled Monday that you’d like to see covered? For some reason, I have trouble coming up with the ideas from week to week . . . probably because there are so MANY things to cover!
I like that – clear, intuitatively obvious usage of the quotation marks. So unlike the MLA handbook stridentcy.
But Deb, you missed out on the use/misuse of what have come to be known as “SCARE QUOTES” (as illustrated in caps). Perhaps you’re just saving it for next Monday?
I’m a court reporter and I often hear people relate conversations they had years ago. I hate to put that in quotation marks because that really suggests it’s verbatim and it’s almost certainly not. Do you think one should omit the quotation marks in that case and just capitalize the first word in the remark, as one would when relating internal thoughts?
That’s an interesting question! I’m not actually sure . . . My best answer would be to use single quote marks–since you’re doing a direct quote anyway, that makes the “he said,” “she said,” rightfully a quote within a quote….
Well, this is a controversial subject amongst court reporters. I have not read your post, but I’m 99.99999% sure that you and I agree on this subject, because we use proper punctuation and grammar and are somewhat sticklers about it. When somebody says the following in court or a deposition:
Q. Did she say something?
A. I heard her say, ‘That’s my favorite color.”
that’s the way I would put it in my transcript. Meaning I would put it in quotes. However, this is hashed out in our court reporting meetings ad infinitum. Some say what I say, and some say, as your commenter says, that it should look like this:
Q. Did she say something?
A. I heard her say, That’s my favorite color.
This, however, fits in absolutely NO rule of grammar except some perceived court reporter’s grammar where the court reporter is afraid (IMHO) that someone is going to sue her or him for quoting someone when it’s not an ACTUAL verbatim quote, or what I say following the next sentence — just plain laziness. It’s silly, in my opinion, but in the court reporting world I think I’m in the relative minority in that belief. (minority being, I’m guessing, something like 40/60% at meetings) In brutal honesty, what I think it is for court reporters? They don’t want the hard job of putting all those extra quotation marks in. Heh.
Because, talk about ambiguous, it is awful if you don’t use quotation marks. Here’s an example:
Q. Were you talking to him?
A. Yes.
Q. What did he say?
A. That’s my favorite color.
I mean, REALLY. How ambiguous is that??? Is the person not answering the question, but making a non sequitur? Or is he answering the question that the person said, “That’s my favorite color”?
The real experts in our trade journals agree with me, and say that’s preferable, but they also say the other way is acceptable, I think largely based on the outcry from all these reporters with the other opinion.
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I generally do use quotation marks because, as you point out, it just seems pedantic to not use them and they help the reader follow what’s happening. However, we all know there are many witnesses who speak like this (from an actual depo):
A. He told me that he was involved in a company that was doing investments in China, and the returns, when they told me the returns, I said, There’s no way; there’s no possible way. And he came over to my house, showed me a brochure that I still can remember to this day as just, where I just, I kind of laughed at it, you know, and I just go, you know, this is just, you know — from the Dun & Bradstreet report there was just things that didn’t, you know — I just go, you know, Darryl — I just wasn’t comfortable with it.
According to the Gregg Reference Manual of Style, “Quotation marks are not needed to set off interior thoughts or imagined dialogue.” In such a broken speech pattern, and with the witness changing tenses in mid stream, it reads more like a stream of consciousness novel to me than anything that’s close to a verbatim quotation. So if that is the pattern of speech, and particularly if the witness is changing tenses, I often will leave out the quotation marks.
Here’s a different example from a recent depo:
MR. S.: So we took it upon ourselves, in an exercise of due diligence, to contact the original photographers and say, Gee, could we make copies? Could you produce copies of the photographs from your negatives? Which is what we did.
There’s no way this senior partner in a large law firm (the speaker) called up the photographer and said those specific words, using that language. It’s more the concept that he’s relating, and that’s why it seems more appropriate to me to leave out the quotation marks. (You’ll also notice the punctuation is not “correct,” as I have set off the last clause as though it were a complete sentence. The speaker skipped a beat before delivering that line, so I followed his lead and set it off for emphasis.)
It’s not that I’m afraid of being sued; I really can’t imagine that happening. And I don’t know that it’s because we’re “lazy” that some of us debate this point. It takes a lot more thought and effort to consider each piece of dialogue within a transcript and decide on the appropriate resolution, punctuation-wise.
Which comes back to my point of asking Deb her opinion. When it comes down to it, it’s readability and common sense that matter, so I was interested in what a non-legal mind thought.
Should I use double quote marks for a song title withint another quote?:
“To tame a dragon,” Joe said, “look it straight in the eye and hum “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The dragon will be yours forever.”
Or single quote marks?
@Susan–I would say single quotes–when quoting inside another quote, you use single quotes to differentiate–so why would song titles be different?