Grammar 101 – Quotation Marks
Quotation marks, or quotes, do exactly what their name suggests they do: they show direct quotations and dialogue. This means that what falls between those quotes has to be exactly, to the letter, what the other person said or wrote. If it’s off, even by a word, it’s not a direct quote anymore.
Let’s say your mother just shouted up the stairs that it is now dinnertime and you should come eat. When I was young, generally meant that my mother said, “Dinner is ready.” That’s exactly what she said-nothing different. Since those were her exact words, I put them inside quotation marks so that you, reading along, would know precisely what she would say.
An indirect quote is what you get when you refer to the sense of what someone else says without using their exact wording. To use the example above with an indirect quotation, I could write something different. When my mother had dinner ready, she would shout upstairs that it was time to come eat. See? Same sense-dinner is ready and I should get my behind to the table-but not her words, so no quotation marks are needed.
That’s the basics, and it’s really just about all that quotation marks are used for. There are a few other uses, but we’ll get to them at the end, because there are other things that are more important. Strap in, because this might get a little bit complicated.
For starters, it’s possible to have a quote inside another quote. If you are repeating someone who is repeating someone else, you need to show that. This is called nesting quotes. Just as you don’t want to attribute someone else’s words to you, you don’t want to attribute words to a person who didn’t say them.
The way this works is with single quotes. These look exactly like quotation marks, except that instead of a pair of them, there’s only one. In fact, they look exactly like an apostrophe (and a single quote uses the apostrophe key on your keyboard). Don’t confuse it with an apostrophe, though, because it’s not the same thing.
(Allow me to get technical for a second here. A single quote and an apostrophe look identical, but have different jobs and a different name. They are what is called homographs, which means that they are written the same way but aren’t the same. It’s similar to a situation with a word that can pronounced two different ways and has two different meanings, but looks the same. Consider the following sentence: Allow me to present your present. Notice that two words are identical in appearance, but different in meaning and pronunciation. Those are homographs, just like single quotes and apostrophes.)
To nest quotes, you take turns between double and single quotes. It looks something like this:
I said, “Bob said, ‘I can’t believe that Mary said, “I’m going to kill him for saying, ‘I don’t like your dress.'”‘”
Notice that each quotation mark, double or single, has a corresponding one on each side of the quote. It can get messy at the end when a bunch of quotes finish at the same time, but that’s the way it works. Since there are four people being quoted above – me, Bob, Mary, and some other guy – there are four sets of quotation marks.
Other punctuation with quotation marks gets a little tricky, but it’s really just a case of memorization. In English, periods and commas go inside quotation marks. Semicolons and colons go outside quotation marks. Exclamation points and question marks are a little more difficult. To properly punctuate with these, you need to know exactly what you are saying. These go inside the quotation marks if they are a part of what is being quoted:
Bob asked, “Do you like my hat?”
Since Bob asked a question, the question mark goes inside the quotation marks. If, however, the question or exclamation isn’t a part of the actual quote, these punctuation marks go outside of the quotation marks:
I’m terrified when people say, “I need to talk to you”!
We can safely assume that people aren’t always saying that phrase emphatically. Instead, the writer is really scared of people who do this. The exclamation point goes with the whole sentence, not the quote, so it goes outside the quotation marks. Putting the exclamation point inside the quotes changes the meaning of the sentence significantly. Know what you mean to punctuate correctly.
Dialogue is a whole different ball of wax, and once again, the rules change according to the punctuation going with the quotation marks. There are three places you can put the “_______ said” part of a sentence of dialogue: first, in the middle, or at the end. The punctuation changes in each case.
If it comes first, place a comma before the quote and the end punctuation inside the quotation marks as normal:
He said, “I’m tired and I need to sleep”
She asked, “What do you think you are doing?”
I screamed, “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll jump off this bridge!”
If it comes at the end, replace periods with commas inside the quotes and put a period at the end of the whole sentence. Question marks and exclamation points need to stay inside the quotes, but the whole sentence needs to end with a period:
“I’m tired and I need to sleep,” he said.
“What do you think you are doing?” she asked.
“If you don’t leave right now, I’ll jump off this bridge!” I screamed.
When it comes in the middle, you separate it off with commas. The first comes in the first set of quotation marks and the second comes just before the second set of quotation marks. The end punctuation goes inside:
“I’m tired,” he said, “and I need to sleep.”
“What,” she asked, “do you think you are doing?”
“If you don’t leave right now,” I screamed, “I’ll jump off this bridge!”
(Here’s a tip. If you can’t remember this, always put the “________ said” part at the start of the sentence. It’s the easiest way to punctuate this, and you’ll never get it wrong.)
Another fun punctuation mark that comes into play with quotes is the ellipse. Usually referred to as the “dot-dot-dot,” ellipses show that you’ve removed unnecessary information from the quote. To help get your point across quickly and cleanly, you have taken out things that aren’t needed for your meaning. My favorite example is to quote the entirety of the Bible with the generous use of ellipses. The first three words of the Bible are “In the beginning,” and the last word is “Amen.” So, here’s the whole Bible:
“InâÂ?¦beginningâÂ?¦Amen.”
The ellipses show that you’ve removed material that was originally there, but wasn’t relevant for what you’re discussing. The removal can be as little as one word or as big as several hundred pages. Most fall on the shorter end of that spectrum. You need an ellipse every time you take words out of a quotation, and, like the example above, you need an ellipse for each part you remove. If you take out six consecutive words, one ellipse does the job. If you take out six words from six different places, you need six ellipses.
There is one last important piece of punctuation that deals with quotation marks. Brackets are used to show important information that may be missing from a quote. They are used to show that what is inside wasn’t actually a part of the quote, but that you are including it to help the quote make sense. An example should help clarify this:
He said, “To use them correctly, you need to know what you mean.”
What’s them? We don’t really know out of context like this. Brackets allow us to put that information inside the quote to help the whole thing makes sense. It looks like this:
He said, “To use them [quotation marks] correctly, you need to know what you mean.”
This tells the reader that the stuff inside the brackets wasn’t actually said, so it isn’t a part of the quote. However, you’ve put it there for clarity. It helps the quote make sense, and prevents you from having to quote a paragraph of information just to make sense of one word in the part you care about. Note that I used the square-sided brackets instead of the curly brackets (also called braces). The curly brackets are pretty, but aren’t used for this function. Instead, these show lists of equal choices, or functions in math and music. Don’t worry about them-we don’t need them here.
In English, we also use quotation marks to indicate the titles of shorter works. Think of it this way: put the name of something in quotation marks if it is part of a larger work. Short stories, songs, short poems, articles in magazines, essays, episodes of television shows, and chapters in books are all part of a bigger thing. These titles go in quotation marks. Those larger works-story compilations, CDs, books of poetry, magazines, television series, and books-don’t get put inside quotation marks.
The only other thing we do with quotation marks is use them to set off parts of a sentence to indicate that the words inside aren’t really part of the sentence, but are what we’re specifically talking about. Look up a couple of paragraphs where I placed “_________ said” inside quotation marks. I did that to indicate that what was inside wasn’t really a part of the flow of the sentence, but was what I was referring to. Without the quotation marks, you need to read the sentence a couple of times to figure out what I meant. The quotation marks just make reading that sentence a little easier because it clarifies what I’m referring to simply and easily.
One last thing. Everyone knows someone who likes to do the “finger quotes” like I did just there. You know what I’m talking about. People like to do this to show irony or indicate that the words inside the quotation marks aren’t meant seriously. You shouldn’t have to rely on cheap parlor tricks like this to get your meaning across, so don’t denigrate the quotation marks by using them this way. It’s not their purpose.
Got all of this? Then say, “I now understand how to use quotation marks!”
