During the Renaissance, quotations were distinguished by setting in a typeface contrasting with the main body text (often italic type vs roman). In the first centuries of typesetting, quotations were distinguished merely by indicating the speaker, and this can still be seen in some editions of the Christian Bible. (Despite the different code points, the curved and straight versions are sometimes considered multiple glyphs of the same character.) Question marks in a quotation within a quotation can get tricky. If a quotation functions as a subject or object in a sentence, it might not need a comma. Technically, the mark designating feet is a prime; the mark designating inches is a double prime.
What is the function of quotation marks?
Also note that, as a courtesy, there is visible space between adjacent single and double quotation marks. Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations. If a question is within the quoted material, a question mark should be placed inside the quotation marks. Less commonly, single quotation marks are used in place of parentheses, in which case the translation is not set off with commas. Because the quoted material is set off from the main text, it is not necessary to use quotation marks.
- In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo marked literal and appropriate quotes with oblique double dashes on the left margin of each line.
- This is because indirect speech can be a paraphrase; it is not a direct quote, and in the course of any composition, it is important to document when one is using a quotation versus when one is just giving content, which may be paraphrased, and which could be open to interpretation.
- For more on the proper use of multiple punctuation at the end of a sentence, see here.
- Performance by these “smart quotes” features was far from perfect overall (variance potential by e.g. subject matter, formatting/style convention, user typing habits).
- Place a comma inside the quotation mark if using a reporting clause after the quote.
- If quotation marks are used inside another pair of quotation marks, then single quotation marks are used.
App I love But…..
- 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.
- There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word.
- AP style uses quotation marks for titles of creative works like books, movies, songs, TV shows, and other compositions.
- (For other languages employing dashes, see section Quotation dash below.) The dashes may be used entirely without quotation marks as well.
- Because the quoted material is set off from the main text, it is not necessary to use quotation marks.
The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marksA are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. In the TeX typesetting program, left double quotes are produced by typing two back-ticks (“) and right double quotes by typing two apostrophes (”).
Meaning of quotation mark in English
However, most computer text-editing programs provide a “smart quotes” feature to automatically convert straight quotation marks into bidirectional punctuation, though sometimes imperfectly (see § Smart quotes). Standard English computer keyboard layouts inherited the single and double straight quotation marks from the typewriter (the single quotation mark also doubling as an apostrophe), and they do not include individual keys for left-handed and right-handed typographic quotation marks. Straight single and double quotation marks are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters, collectively known as string literals. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility may suggest that a thin space ( ) or larger non-breaking space ( ) be inserted. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other punctuation within the sentence, such as a colon or closing punctuation.
Capitalize the first letter of the quoted sentence
Scare quotes generally appear as quotation marks around a single word or sometimes a phrase. Spanish uses angled quotation marks (comillas latinas or angulares), with no space between the quotation mark and the quoted material. In case of quoted material inside a quotation, rules and most noted style manuals prescribe the use of different kinds of quotation marks. North American printing usually puts full stops and commas (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not. Nevertheless, while other languages do not insert spaces between the quotation marks and the word(s) quoted, the French usage does insert them, even if they are narrow spaces.
Direct quotes use the exact words from a source and require quotation marks. The curved quotation marks, as well as the straight single quotation mark, are permitted. Other usages of quotation marks (“quote„ for double, ‹quote› for single) are obsolete in Portuguese.citation needed.
Place punctuation marks inside quotation marks
In non-fiction, some British publishers may permit placing punctuation that is not part of the person’s speech inside the quotation marks but prefer that it be placed outside. When quoted text is interrupted, such as with the phrase he said, a closing quotation mark is used before the interruption, and an opening quotation mark after. Likewise, the typographic opening single quotation mark is sometimes used to represent the ʻokina while either the typographic closing single quotation mark or the neutral single quotation mark may represent the prime symbol.
An indirect quote lets you capture or summarize what someone said or wrote without using their exact words. Quotation marks are a type of punctuation with several different functions. This convention was later standardized in RFC 3676, and was adopted subsequently by many email clients when automatically including quoted text from previous messages (in plain text mode). For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as the generic replacement character � or “mojibake” (gibberish).
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 spinorhino casino 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.
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.
They signal the use of someone else’s words to help distinguish between the source’s voice and the quoted material. Several other Unicode characters with quotation mark semantics lack the character property. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use “ and ”, and to represent single curly quotes use ‘ and ’. There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. Historically, support for curved quotes was a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them.f
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.
The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly quotation marks. All other forms of quotation marks, such as angled, lowered, inverted, were not provided by British or American typewriters. When corner brackets are being used for quotations, quote-within-quote segments are marked with white corner brackets. Neither the Portuguese language regulator nor the Brazilian prescribe a particular shape for quotation marks, they only prescribe when and how they should be used.
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 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
Since the 2000s, the plain quotes have become more common.citation needed The 2013 revision of the SI-1452 standard for Hebrew keyboard, available since 2012 in Windows 8 and in desktop Linux systems, supports both systems, as does the Gboard keyboard for touchscreen devices. In Israel, the traditional practice in printing and handwriting is to use „low-high” quote marks. Since these continuation marks are obsolete in French, there is no support for automatic insertion of continuation guillemets in HTML or CSS, nor in word-processors. With this older style there was also not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets; both often pointed to the right (as today’s French closing guillemets do).citation needed A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation. The symbol used as the left (typographical) quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria and a “low double comma” „ (not used in English) is used for the left quote.
