Grammar Girl here.

Today's topic is single quotation marks versus double quotation marks.

Cyndy left this message on the MyChingo line:

Hey Grammar Girl. I would love for a future topic to be on the use of quotes versus, I don't know, the single quote. Sometimes I call it the apostrophe. I always thought that the use of a quote is only when you are actually talking about words that were spoken, not when you are trying to, sort of, put a little sub-bracket around something. I just see quotes used so often on content that is not an actual quote, and I think that that's incorrect. Am I right?

Tony (from Deadwood, South Dakota), Steve (from Albany, New York), and David (from Cleveland, Ohio), also e-mailed to ask about single versus double quote marks, so it seems as if a lot of people are really confused about this particular issue.

First, there are other legitimate uses for quotation marks besides surrounding direct quotations or spoken words. Double quotation marks are often used around titles, as in the titles of two of my favorite Dr. Seuss books: “Green Eggs And Ham” and “If I Ran The Zoo.” In some cases you can use italics for titles instead of quotation marks.

Double quotation marks can also be used to indicate that a word is special in some way. I bet you've all seen quotation marks used as something called scare quotes, which are quotation marks put around a word to show that the writer doesn't buy into the meaning. For example, I could write the sentence: Women achieved “equality” when they were granted the right to vote in 1920. This would indicate that although women getting the right to vote was heralded as equality at the time, I don't think it was enough of a gain to merit the word equality. More often though, scare quotes (which are also sometimes called sneer quotes) are used to impart a sense of irony or disdain. They're especially common in nasty political commentary, as in Politicians “care” about their constituents*.

Double quotation marks can also be used when you are writing a sentence and you want to refer to a word rather than use its meaning. This comes up in almost every Grammar Girl episode, and I previously used quotation marks in this way; but it's a style issue and you can also use italics to call out the word. So, I decided to change the Grammar Girl style and use italics instead of quotes because I thought it would look cleaner, and I went back and edited 21 old episode transcripts. After that folly, my wrists hurt and I vowed never to change a style again!

So, the question is still out there: When do you use single quotation marks? The most common use is when you are quoting someone who is quoting someone else. You enclose the primary speaker's comments in double quotation marks, and then you enclose the thing they are quoting in single quotation marks. For example, imagine you've interviewed the aardvark for a magazine article about his harrowing ordeal with the arrow, and he said, “Squiggly saved my life when he said, 'Hang in there, aardvark.'” You would write that as, “Squiggly saved my life when he said, 'Hang in there, aardvark.'” And, if you're ever in the extremely rare position of having to nest another quote inside a sentence like that, you would use double quotation marks again for the quote inside of the single quotation marks.

And finally, a couple of other uses for single quotation marks are using them when there's a quote in a headline**, and using them to highlight words with special meaning in certain disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and linguistics.

Also, Katherine at Clark College asked me to point out the difference between the words quote and quotation. Quote is a verb that means to repeat what someone else has said or written. For example, "The aardvark quoted Squiggly." Quotation is noun used to describe what you are quoting, as in "Squiggly's quotation was inspiring."

It's common to hear people use the noun quote as a shortened form of quotation, as in "I filled my notebook with quotes from The Daily Show," but this is technically wrong. It should be, "I filled my notebook with quotations from The Daily Show." Now, I agree the correct way sounds kind of pretentious, and given that a lot of reference sources have extra entries discussing how the misuse is widespread, you aren't going to sound illiterate if you use quote incorrectly, but it is still really good to know the difference.

So, that's all about quotation marks for now, but don't worry: I know a lot of you have asked other quote- and quotation-mark-related questions, and I have them all in the queue. There are just a lot of detailed rules and it's too much to cover all at once in a single episode.


More Proofreading

Plus, I have some fun follow-up information about proofreading. If you haven't been over to the transcripts yet at quickanddirtytips.com, you're missing out on some great listener comments.

Linda in Arizona posted a link to a newspaper article describing a typo on the ballot for the upcoming election that makes an item on the Arizona ballot inconsistent with the more complete wording of the proposition, and it appears that if the proposition passes, what the law really means will have to be worked out in court. So that's a really expensive and unfortunate typo!

Other people have also posted great proofreading tips, including one suggesting that you can use software that comes with Apple computers to have the computer read your text to you, so that you can hear any errors. That seems like a great tip because it overcomes the problem of your eyes skipping over typos because you know what you meant to write.

Poll

Finally, about 280 people have taken the proofreading poll so far, and most of you think you are either great proofreaders or average proofreaders. Only 20% of you admitted to being bad proofreaders.

Older Episodes

OK. Here's a great voice mail I got this morning:

This is Miss Alvarez's 11th grade SAT class in Valley Stream, New York, and we were wondering if you could talk about the difference between "that" and "which." Thanks!

I loved the little "whoop" at the end of that message. There's a kid who is excited about grammar! I actually covered that versus which in episode number eight, Which's Brew, but obviously that information is hard to find because people are e-mailing or calling almost every day to ask me to cover this topic. So, check out Which's Brew, and I will be working on a way to make older episodes easier to find.

Diversions

Also, I have to share a great diversion. Elizabeth from Santa Cruz sent me a link to a wonderful video at YouTube where Weird Al Yankovic does a parody of a Bob Dylan song using nothing but palindromes. So if you like that sort of thing I put a link in the transcript section at quickanddirtytips.com for you.

Weird Al Palindromes Video at YouTube

And finally, a listener named Paula created a Grammar Girl page at Wikipedia! If you want to check it out, or you are into editing Wikipedia articles, there's a direct link to the page in the transcript at quickanddirtytips.com.

So, that's all! As always, this is Grammar Girl striving to be your friendly guide in the writing world. Thank you to everyone for all you do to help me with the show.

New Diversions

Quotation Abuse Page at Flickr

Grammar Girl Page at Flickr

Unnecessary Quotation Marks Page

[Note: American and British English have different rules about quotation marks. The rules and styles presented here are based on American usage.]

*Normally I would put this sentence in quotation marks, but I wanted to reserve them to make the point that the word is meant to be facetious, so I chose to emphasize the sentence with italics.

**This is a style issue; some publications use double quotes in headlines.