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.
The Chicago Manual of Style suggests 100 words or more as a general rule, but offers many factors other than length to be considered. How do you determine if your quotation is short (allowing it to be incorporated into the main text) or long (requiring a block quotation)? In contrast to the main text, a block quotation might also have a bigger right-hand margin, be in a smaller or otherwise different font, or have reduced line spacing. Style varies, but at a minimum a block quotation should have a bigger left-hand margin than the main text.
- Also note that, as a courtesy, there is visible space between adjacent single and double quotation marks.
- When a run-in quotation contains quotation marks within the quoted material itself, use single quotation marks in their place.
- In general, short-form works like poems, songs, or short stories use quotation marks, while long-form works like books, films, or stage plays use italics.
- Quotation marks can also set off a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title; for example, Nat “King” Cole, Frank “Chairman of the Board” Sinatra, or Simone Rizzo “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante.
- There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML.
- 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.
What is the function of 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.
Quotes within quotes
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.
Other rules for quotation marks
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. 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.
Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively for quoting dialogues rather than for single statements, and is virtually always the one used for that purpose in works of fiction. In Polish printed books and publications, this dictionary-recommended style for guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) is used almost exclusively. Guillemet marks pointing outwards are used for definitions (mainly in scientific publications and dictionaries), as well as for enclosing spoken lines and indirect speech, especially in poetic texts. But the most frequent convention used in printed books for nested quotations is to style them in italics.
With narration of direct speech, both styles retain punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a full stop changing into a comma if followed by attributive matter, also known as a speech tag or annunciatory clause. In the United States, the prevailing style is called American style, whereby commas and periods are almost always placed inside closing quotation marks. Periods and commas that are part of the person’s speech are permitted inside the quotation marks regardless of whether the material is fiction.
Order of punctuation
If a quoted question ends in midsentence, the question mark replaces a comma. The placement of question marks with quotation marks follows logic. To add quotation mark to a word list please sign up or log in.
- The closing or right single quotation mark is identical in form to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol.
- With narration of direct speech, both styles retain punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a full stop changing into a comma if followed by attributive matter, also known as a speech tag or annunciatory clause.
- 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.
- In general, quotation marks are extended to encompass as much speech as possible, including not just unspoken text such as “he said” (as previously noted), but also as long as the conversion extends.
- Typographic quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text.
- Use quotation marks to represent speech in written text.
- Short quotations can generally be run in to the main text using quotation marks.
The Unicode mapping for PostScript Standard Encoding preserves the typographic approximation convention by mapping its equivalent of ASCII grave and single-quote to the Unicode curly quotation mark characters. At that time typesetting did use spinorhino casino curved quotation marks.citation needed The ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, contains the straight versions only (U+0027 ‘ APOSTROPHE and U+0022 ” QUOTATION MARK). In Brazil, angular quotation marks are rare, and curved quotation marks (“quote” and ‘quote’) are almost always used. Further, running dialogue does not use quotation marks beyond the first sentence, as changes in speaker are indicated by a dash, as opposed to the English use of closing and re-opening the quotation. In Bulgarian, Icelandic, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Russian, single quotation marks are not used.clarification needed
If you’re quoting a complete sentence, capitalize the first letter of the first word, just like a typical sentence. To indicate the measurement correctly, place the marks directly after the number with no space. No quotes are necessary if the nickname is how a famous person is most commonly recognized, as with many historical figures. The standard is to place the quoted nickname between the first name and the surname, although that’s not necessarily a rule.
Quotation marks in English
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.