Editor's Corner

Hello, folks.

Today I’m rehashing some old rules, but they require rehashing because so many people ignore them <sigh>. I’ll try to provide you with the primary details so as not to overwhelm. Today’s topic is quotation marks.

You may ask yourself, “What’s the big deal?” My response is, “Use them correctly and it’s not a big deal.” But I see them used incorrectly all the time and it leads to confusion. Here are some examples:

Incorrect: ‘Joe told me that Marcus would be at his party.’

Incorrect: At the ‘Adjustment?’ prompt, type ‘01’.

Go ahead and have a look and see if you can figure out why these are incorrect, then we’ll get to the rules and the correct way to write them.

First rule: In our documentation, you will most often use double quotes. I suspect programming has different rules, but our rule is that if you want to quote something, you use double quotes.

Example: One of my favorite funny quotes from Jack Handy is “Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.”

Second rule: In U.S. English, “punctuation such as commas, periods, question marks, and exclamation marks (generally) go inside quotation marks.” (GrammarBook.com) For the exceptions, this is a great document: How to Punctuate Quotations.

Example: Jameela asked, “What are we having for lunch today?”

Third rule: When you are using quotation marks to emphasize a term or expression that’s different from standard use, you use double quotation marks the first time you use the term, and then drop the quotation marks the next time you use the term in a sentence.

Examples (from GrammarBook.com):

• I just spoke with my "buddy," the IRS agent assigned to my audit.
• At this real estate firm, that contract is what we call a "dealio."

Fourth rule: When you have a quotation within a quotation, it is okay to use single quotes for the inner quotation. There are more rules to this piece, but most of you won’t be writing quotes within quotes, so let’s look at an example and stop there.

Example: “I can’t believe Nils said, ‘I refuse to do it!’ when I asked him to change his shirt.”

I’m going to stop there, and go through the incorrect examples, and tell you why they are wrong.

Incorrect: ‘Joe told me that Marcus would be at his party.’

No single quotations marks for quotations (unless it is a quotation within a quotation).

Incorrect: At the ‘Adjustment?’ prompt, type ‘01’.

No single quotation marks because the information is already bolded to stand out; and by the way, the period should be inside the quotation marks. The way this is written is confusing.

Sam is worried that he has single quotation marks!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Technical Publications

Pronouns: she/her | Call via Teams | jackhenry.com

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