| Single
Quotes or Double Quotes
I am noticing a tendency for writers to use single quotes
in their documents. However, this is lazy. Double quotes
should be the norm. Single quotes are used in two places.
1. Use single quotes to set off material already inside
double quotes.
Example
At the last strategic planning session, the chair said, “We
should review our mission statement and incorporate it in
the new brochure ‘The Company That Grew.’ ”
Note:
When a sentence ends with both single and double quotation
marks, separate them by a space.
2. Use single quotes within a headline of
a document. This allows you to save space.
Example (Newspaper Headline)
UN’s ‘mission impossible’
Mission
impossible has quotes around it to indicate the
words were being used ironically. Single quotes were used
to save space on the line.
Readers of previous columns will remember that periods
and commas always go inside closing quotation marks and
colons and semicolons go outside. Yes, the placement of
periods within quotation marks is a change. It occurred
about 10 years ago.
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