2 Quotes Or 1 Quote

Do you know when to use quotation marks? How about single quotation marks?

2 Quotes Or 1 Quote

2 quotes have been tagged as no-one-quote: Ken Poirot: ‘No one cares until someone cares; be that one!’ and Ken Poirot: ‘Anyone can perform good deeds fo.

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How to Use Single Quotation Marks

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

How to Use Double Quotation Marks

Most people think of double quotation marks as being for quotations, which they are, but they also have other legitimate uses. For example, double quotation marks are often used around the title of a short work such as a magazine article or an episode of a TV show.

The 'Darmok' episode of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' is one of my favorites.

The rules for longer works, such as books, are tricky. The Associated Press uses quotation marks, but the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook recommend italics.

Here are some of the more common situations where people use double quotation marks:

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1. Use double quotation marks for scare quotes
2. Use double quotation marks for words used as examples

Let's talk more about these examples below.

Use Double Quotation Marks for Scare Quotes

2 Quotes Or 1 Quotes

People also sometimes use double quotation marks 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.

That 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.*

Use Double Quotation Marks for Words Used as Examples

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. Since I talk about words a lot, this comes up in almost every Grammar Girl episode. It's a style choice. You can use italics or double quotation marks to highlight words, but we use quotation marks on the Grammar Girl site.

Be Careful of Unnecessary Quotation Marks

A common mistake, though, is to use quotation marks to simply highlight a word in a sentence. The popular “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks (rest in peace) did nothing but mock signs that misuse quotation marks in this way. For example, if you are promoting your gluten-free cookies, and you put “gluten-free” in quotation marks, that actually means they have gluten. Stick with underlining or italics, or bold to highlight words.

Why Use Single Quotation Marks?

Here are some of the most common reasons people use single quotation marks:

1. Use single quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation
2. Use single quotation marks in headlines
3. Use single quotation marks for words not being used for their meaning

Let's talk more about each of these situations.

Use Single Quotation Marks for a Quotation Within a Quotation

The most common reason to use single quotation marks is to quote someone who is quoting someone else. The rules are different in British English, but in American English, you enclose the primary speaker's comments in double quotation marks, and then you enclose the thing they are quoting in single quotation marks. You nest them, with the double quotation marks on the outside and the single quotation marks on the inside.

For example, imagine you've interviewed Aardvark for a magazine article about his harrowing ordeal with an arrow, and he said, “Squiggly saved my life when he yelled, 'Watch out, Aardvark.' ”

Thing 1 And 2 Quotes

If you're ever in the extremely rare position of having to nest another quotation inside a sentence like that, you would use double quotation marks again for the third nested quotation.

You can find many articles that say British English uses single quotation marks around a direct quotation instead of double quotation marks, and although doing so is more common in British English than in American English, it doesn’t seem to be a hard-and-fast rule. I found many British news sites that used double quotation marks just like an American site would, including The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Sun, and the BBC. It seems like using single quotation marks is more of an option in British English than a prevailing style. And in Britain, they also sometimes call them inverted commas.

Use a Thin Space Between a Single Quotation Mark and a Double Quotation Mark

It can be hard to see a single quotation mark that’s followed by a double quotation mark when they fall right next to each other like they did in the last example, so typesetters sometimes insert something called a thin space between the two quotation marks. A thin space is just what it sounds like: a space that’s thinner than a regular space.

@GrammarGirl Very useful post. Re: Thin Space; its Unicode codepoint is U+2009. Example; with ' ', and without '. — Shervin Afshar (@shervinafshar) June 19, 2013

Use Single Quotation Marks in Headlines

Another place you’ll see single quotation marks a lot is in headlines in newspapers and on websites because the Associated Press uses single quotation marks for quotations in headlines.

Use Single Quotation Marks to Highlight Words Not Being Used for Their Meaning

Finally, it’s the convention in certain disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and linguistics to highlight words with special meaning by using single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks.

'Quote' Versus 'Quotation'

Also, a frequent point of confusion is 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, 'Aardvark quoted Squiggly.' “Quotation” is a 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 that is technically wrong. It should be, 'I filled my notebook with quotations from 'The Daily Show.'

I agree the correct way sounds a bit 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 good to know the difference.

Summary

In American English, use double quotation marks to surround a quotation. In British English, you can use single or double quotation marks for that. If you write for a company or publication, check your style guide. If you need to put a quotation inside your first quotation, use the opposite type of quotation marks to surround it. That’s single quotation marks in American English.

Double quotation marks can also be used to show sarcasm or to identify words used as words instead of for their meaning. Single quotation marks are often used in headlines and in some disciplines to highlight words with special meanings.

*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.

• It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.
  -- A. A. Gill

• Let's begin by taking a smallish nap or two.
  -- A. A. Milne

• Come, come, come. Without a monster or two it's not a quest, merely a gaggle of friends wandering about.
  -- A. A. Milne

• But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two.
  -- A. A. Milne

• There are two ways of getting out of a trial. One is simply to try to get rid of the trial, and be thankful when it is over. The other is to recognize the trial as a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing than we have ever had, and to hail it with delight as an opportunity of obtaining a larger measure of divine grace.
  -- A. B. Simpson

• The spiritual master and Krishna are two parallel lines. The train, on two tracks, moves forward. The spiritual Master and Krishna are like these two tracks. They must be served simultaneously. Krishna helps one to find bona fide Spiritual Master and bona fide Spiritual Master helps one to understand Krishna. If one does not get bona fide Spiritual Master, then how he can ever understand Krishna ? You cannot serve Krishna without Spiritual Master, or serve just Spiritual Master without serving Krishna. They must be served simultaneously.
  -- A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

• Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...
  -- A. C. Cuza

• Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.
  -- A. E. Hotchner

• On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
  -- A. E. Housman

• If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.
  -- A. J. Liebling

• In the middle of nowhere, along a quiet stretch of road, the diner dreamt of the hungry dead. And of two men.
  -- A. Lee Martinez

• Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.
  -- A. Whitney Brown

• Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.
  -- A.C. Grayling

• There are two types of people in the world, and I'm one of them.
  -- Aaron Allston

• I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.
  -- Aaron Belz

• If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
  -- Aaron Copland

• My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.
  -- Aaron Levie

• What's so great about television. You're able to tell a long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.
  -- Aaron Paul

• Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.
  -- Aaron Sorkin

• I think there are two ways to depict a family. One is what it's really like, and one is what the audience would like it to be. Between you and me, I think the second one is what I would prefer.
  -- Aaron Spelling

• Coming from a background of being onstage, you're onstage for two and a half hours and you're in it for the whole time no matter what you're doing. Even if you don't have a line, you have to stay in it.
  -- Aaron Tveit

• That's the thing about stage: It's something you can't find anywhere else. It's a two-and-a-half, three-hour experience, and it's a real relationship. You're sending out energy from the stage, but the audience is giving you back so much also, so that's also lifting you and pushing you forward as you're performing and giving you so much energy. You can't find it anywhere else, and that's why people get addicted to being on stage, and when they're not on stage are kind of looking for that and constantly searching for it.
  -- Aaron Tveit

• American ladies are known abroad for two distinguishing traits (besides, possibly, their beauty and self-reliance), and these are their ill-health and their extravagant devotion to dress.
  -- Abba Louisa Goold Woolson

• People are needed to take up the challenge, strong people, who proclaim the truth, throw it in people's faces, and do what they can with their own two hands.
  -- Abbe Pierre

• Sure, we had to be skinny. I lived on Diet Coke and apples for two years. For the couture, we had to get up at 4 am to be sewn into the clothes and there was huge pressure to be thin. But I made a million dollars by the time I was 20, I bought a town house in Manhattan and put myself through Columbia. Does that make me a victim?
  -- Abbey Lee Kershaw

• Were you already here?' he asked. 'Yeah.' 'Didn't you just bring her home from work two hours ago?' 'Yeah.' Tripp chuckled and shook his head. 'Did you even leave?' 'No.
  -- Abbi Glines

• Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.
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• When I saw the plane, I was absolutely astonished! Two emotions crashed over me: surging joy and crazy fear.
  -- Abby Sunderland

• For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.
  -- Abdul Kalam

• English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.
  -- Abdul Kalam