Quotation mark
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For the Wikipedia quotation template, see here.
Quotation marks, also called quotes, speech marks or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.
They have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
For languages other than English see Quotation mark, non-English usage
Contents |
[edit] Usage
[edit] Quotations and speech
Single or double quotation marks are used to denote either speech or a quotation. Neither style is an absolute rule though double quotes are preferred in the USA, but a publisher’s or even an author’s style may take precedence. The important rule is that the style of opening and closing quotes must be matched.
- ‘Good morning, Dave,’ greeted HAL.
- “Good morning, Dave,” greeted HAL.
For speech within speech, the other is used as inner quotation marks.
- ‘HAL said, “Good morning, Dave,” ’ recalled Frank.
- “HAL said, ‘Good morning, Dave,’ ” recalled Frank.
Omitting quotes is generally not recommended.
Sometimes, quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation. Nesting levels up to five can be found in the Bible. In these cases, questions arise about the form (and names) of the quotation marks to be used. The most common way is to simply alternate between the two forms.
- “…‘…“…‘ … … ’…”…’…”
If such a passage is further quoted in another publication, then all of their forms have to be shifted over by one level.
In most cases, quotations that span multiple paragraphs should be block-quoted, and thus do not require quotation marks. Quotation marks are used for multiple-paragraph quotations in some cases, especially in narratives. The convention in English is to give the first and each subsequent paragraph opening quotes, using closing quotes only for the final paragraph of the quotation. The Spanish convention, though similar, uses closing quotes at the beginning of all subsequent paragraphs beyond the first.
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. Commas are also often used before and after the interruption, more often for quotations of speech than for quotations of text.
- “HAL,” noted Frank, “said that everything was going extremely well.”
It is generally considered incorrect to use quotation marks for paraphrased speech.
If HAL says: "All systems are functional."
- Wrong: HAL said that “Everything was going extremely well.”
- Right: HAL said that everything was going extremely well.
- Right: HAL said, “All systems are functional.”
However, another convention when quoting text in the body of a paragraph or sentence, especially in philosophical essays, is to recognise double quotation marks as marking an exact quote, and single quotation marks as marking a paraphrased quote or a quote where pronouns or plurality have been changed in order to fit the sentence containing the quote.
[edit] Irony
Another important use of quotation marks is to indicate or call attention to ironic or apologetic words. Ironic quotes can also be called scare, sneer, shock, or distance quotes. Ironic quotes are sometimes gestured in oral speech using air quotes:
- My brother claimed he was too “busy” to help me.
Ironic quotes should be used with care. Without the intonational cues of speech, they could obscure the writer’s intended meaning. They could also be confused easily with quotations.
In a similar sense, quotes are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that the word is not being used in its (currently) accepted sense.
- In the fifteenth century, we “knew” that the Sun’s revolution divided day from night.
- Woody Allen joked, “I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.”
[edit] Emphasis (strongly discouraged and incorrect)
Quotes are also sometimes used for emphasis in lieu of underlining or italics, most commonly found on signs or placards. This is discouraged not only because it is an improper usage, but also because it is easily confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation.
- For sale: “fresh” fish, “fresh” oysters
- Teller Lines Open until noon for your “Convenience”
The first statement above could be construed to imply that the word fresh is not being used with its everyday meaning, even so far as to mean that the fish or oysters are anything but “fresh.” The second statement would almost certainly be an innocent mistake, but someone familiar with proper usage might think that the “convenience” was for the bank employees, not the customers.[1] [2] [3] [4]
[edit] Use-mention distinction
Either quotes or italic type can emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself rather than its associated concept.
- Cheese is derived from milk.
- “Cheese” is derived from a word in Old English.
- Cheese has calcium, protein, and phosphorus.
- Cheese has three e's.
In HTML/XHTML, a semi-semantic way to distinguish regular quotes from distance quotes is to use the <q> tag for the former while using actual quotation marks for distance quotes. It is only semi-semantic because the behavior for non-eye-centered media is uncertain. Still, it is safer than not introducing any distinction at all.
[edit] Titles of artistic works
Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of shorter works. Whether these are single or double is again a matter of style:
- Short fiction, poetry, etc.: Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel”
- Book chapters: The first chapter of 3001: The Final Odyssey is “Comet Cowboy”
- Articles in books, magazines, journals, etc.: “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” Wireless World, October 1945
- Album tracks, singles, etc.: David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”
[edit] Nicknames and false titles
Quotation marks are used to offset a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title; for example, Nat “King” Cole.
[edit] Typographical considerations
[edit] Punctuation
The American convention is for sentence punctuation to be included inside the quotation marks, even if the punctuation is not part of the quoted sentence, while the British style shows clearly whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted phrase:
- Someone shouted, ‘Shut up!’. (British)
- Someone shouted, “Shut up!” (American)
In other words, the American rule is a typesetter's rule while the British rule is a grammatical rule (see below for more explanation).
In American English, commas and periods (full stops) always go inside the quotation marks, single or double:
- Also called “plain quotes,” they are teardrops.
- Dave asked, “Did HAL say ‘Good morning,’ or did he not?”
The American English rule is often not applied if the presence of the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks will lead to ambiguity, for example in describing commands to be typed into a computer:
- In the File name text field, type “HelloWorldApp.java”, including the quotation marks.[5]
Due to the influence of computer science (see BNF rules for describing formal languages), what is essentially (if unknowingly) the British standard has become more widely accepted in the U.S.:
- Also called “plain quotes”, they are teardrops.
- Dave asked, “Did HAL say ‘Good morning’, or did he not?”
Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration since the symbols did not form a strict sequence. Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above. However, in subjects such as chemistry and software documentation it is conventional to include only the precise quoted string within the quotes. This avoids ambiguity with regard to whether a punctuation mark belongs to the quote:
- Enter the URL as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.
- The URL starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.
Question marks and exclamation marks must rely on logic to determine whether they go inside or outside:
- Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”? (American)
- No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?” (American)
In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English.
References: Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition; Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford.
[edit] Spacing
In English, when a quotation follows other writing on a line of text, a space precedes the opening quotation mark unless the preceding symbol, such as a dash, requires that there be no space. 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. These exceptions are ignored by some Asian computer systems that systematically display quotation marks with the included spacing.
In Chinese, the spacing is irrelevant since all characters, including punctuation, are the same width.
There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility requires that a non-breaking space be inserted.
- So Dave actually said, “He said, ‘Good morning?’ ”
- Yes, he did say, “He said, ‘Good morning.’ ”
[edit] Non-language related usage
Straight quotes (or italic straight quotes) are often used to approximate the prime and double prime (e.g., when signifying inches and feet, or arcminutes and arcseconds). For instance, 5 feet and 6 inches is often written 5' 6", and 40 degrees, 20 minutes, and 50 seconds is written 40° 20' 50". When available, however, the prime should be used instead (e.g., 5′ 6″, and 40° 20′ 50″). Prime and double prime are not present in most character sets, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 (dec. 8242) and U+2033 (dec. 8243), and as HTML entities ′ and ″.
Straight single and double quotes are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters. In some languages (e.g. Pascal) only one type is allowed, in some (e.g. C and its derivatives) both are used with different meanings and in others (e.g. Python) both are used interchangeably. In many languages, if it is desired to include the same quotes used to delimit a string inside the string, the quotes are doubled. For example to represent the string eat 'hot' dogs in Pascal one uses 'eat ''hot'' dogs'.
[edit] Glyphs
A list of glyphs used as quotation marks and their Unicode (and HTML) values and names follows. The Unicode standard defines two general character categories, “Ps” (punctuation quote start) and “Pe” (punctuation quote end), for all quotation mark characters. (Warning: Some of these glyphs may not display properly in older browsers, which may substitute other sorts or a square.)
[edit] Typewriter quotation marks
“Ambidextrous” quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. However, modern word processors have started to convert text to use curved quotes (see below). Some computer systems designed in the past had proper opening and closing quotes, with a few machines even making a distinction between apostrophes indicating omission (e.g. couldn’t) and apostrophes indicating possession (e.g. Dave’s car). However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only made three quotation marks available: ", ', and the dubious backquote ` (also referred to as a backtick and a letterless grave accent). The Unicode standard includes typographic and a variety of international quotation marks.
| Sample | Unicode (decimal) | HTML and XML | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 'O' | U+0027 (39) | ' in XML, but usually '. ' is not part of the HTML specification. |
Apostrophe (single quote) |
| "O" | U+0022 (34) | ", but usually ". |
Straight quotation mark (double quote) |
Many systems, like the personal computers of the 1980s and early ’90s, actually drew straight quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):
- ”Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.
- ’Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.
The grave accent (`, U+0060) could then be used to supply single quote marks. The typesetting application TeX still uses this convention for input files. This use resulted in fonts with an open quote glyph at the grave accent position. This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double-quote, so many people resorted to using sets of two single quotes for punctuation, which would look like the following:
- ``Good morning, Dave,'' said HAL. ⇒ ‘‘Good morning, Dave,’’ said HAL.
- `Good morning, Dave,' said HAL. ⇒ ‘Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.
However, the appearance of these characters has varied greatly from font to font. On systems which provide straight quotes and grave accents the appearance is poor. Unicode specifies that the glyphs for U+0027 and U+0022 should be vertical rather than angled, which means if such tricks are used with a font that follows the rules, like most do today, the result will look rather messy. Of course Unicode also provides the ability to do angled quotes properly:
- “Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.
- ‘Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.
[edit] Quotation marks in English
English curved quotes, also called “book quotes” or “curly quotes”, look like small figures six and nine with the counters filled. They are preferred in formal writing and printed typography. In e-mail and on Usenet they can only be used by using a MIME type with a character set outside of the ISO-8859 series such as a Unicode encoding or one of the Windows-125x series. In most cases (the exceptions being if UTF-7 is used or if the 8BITMIME extention is present) this also requires the use of a content-transfer encoding. While not a problem for modern mail clients, use of smart quotes in this way slightly increases the size of the mail message and makes the raw source code harder to follow. For these reasons, some believe it is bad practice (in much the same way that some think that HTML e-mail is a bad thing). A few mail clients send curved quotes using the windows-1252 codes, but mark the text as ISO-8859-1, causing problems for decoders that do not make the dubious assumption that C1 control codes in ISO-8859-1 text were meant to be windows-1252 printable characters.
Curved and straight quotes are also sometimes referred to as “smart quotes” and "dumb quotes" respectively; these names are in reference to the name of a function (found in word processors like Microsoft Word) that automatically converts straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes. This function was developed for systems which lack separate open- and close-quote keyboard keys, such as Microsoft Windows. (In contrast, Apple Macintosh users can type open and close single and double quotes directly using the Option and [ ] { } keys.) A quote followed by a letter generally converts to an "open quote", whereas a quote with a letter or period (full stop) preceding it and a space after it converts to a "close quote". This function is usually referred to as "educating quotes".
| Samples | Unicode (decimal) | HTML | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ‘O’ | U+2018 (8216), U+2019 (8217) | ‘ ’ | Single quotes (left and right) |
| “O” | U+201C (8220), U+201D (8221) | “ ” | Double quotes (left and right) |
Variants of ‘ and “ are:
- ‛ – U+201B (HTML: ‛) – single high-reversed-9, or single reversed comma, quotation mark (This is sometimes used to show dropped sounds at the end of words, such as goin‛ instead of using goin‘, goin’, goin`, or goin')
- ‟ – U+201F (HTML: ‟) – double high-reversed-9, or double reversed comma, quotation mark
Supporting curved quotes has been a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them (as discussed above).
Word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users, because in printed documents curved quotes are preferred to straight ones. Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system were using — but the character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, and ISO 8859-1 (typically the default character set for the Unices and, until recently, Linux) has no curved quotes, making cross-platform compatibility a nightmare.
Compounding the problem is the “smart quotes” feature mentioned above, which some word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) use by default. With this feature turned on, users may not have realised that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something entirely different.
Unicode support has since become the norm for operating systems. 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 sometimes been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) are Unicode-aware. But there are many applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur.
There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can result in difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding. 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 "garbage". HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes: ‘ (left single), ’ (right single), ‚ (low 9 single), “ (left double), ” (right double), and &dbquo; (low 9 double). XML does not define these by default, but specifications based on it can do so, and XHTML does. 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. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use “ and ”, and to represent single curly quotes use ‘ and ’. In HTML, it is safest to use the named entity references (“, etc.), although decimal numeric character references can be processed by most web browsers (Netscape 4 being a notable exception).
There has been some argument in recent years about the appropriateness of book quotes, since they are perceived by some as distracting. Editors who are against book quotes generally argue for ASCII-style straight quotes.
[edit] Notes
- ^ http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/style/italics.html
- ^ http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002796.html
- ^ http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/grammar/course/punctuation/3_8.htm
- ^ http://inkthinker.blogspot.com/2006/07/why-quotation-marks-should-not-be-used.html
- ^ Part of a tutorial on Java programming on Microsoft Windows. Those parts of this page which would not be ambiguous follow the American rule
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Curling Quotes in HTML, SGML, and XML
- Beginners guide to quotation marks
- Quotation marks in the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
- ASCII and Unicode quotation marks – detailed discussion of the ASCII `backquote' problem
- The Gallery Of "Misused" Quotation Marks
- Commonly confused characters
- Smart Quotes
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.
