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Listen to This: the astounding ups and downs of quotation marks
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Grammar & StyleWriting Instruction
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ISBN13: 9781066977611
Publisher: Callender Press
Published: Nov 15 2026
Pages: 62
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.17 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
Do we really need to think about quote marks?
Surely not. Why bother when they're just 'there', we learnt about them in school, why on earth go over all that again? Not necessary.
But stop a moment. Have you never had doubts, even just momentarily, about exactly which format to use (double or single, or where, it maybe none at all)? And where the punctuation marks comes before or after, when you quote something?
And no, you're not being stupid or uneducated to hesitate. Everyone does at times, that is the nature of quote marks and their quite surprising history.
As you can see, our writing and reading are nowadays pervaded by the symbols we know as 'inverted commas', 'speech marks', or 'quotation marks' - or often just the shorter 'quote marks' or 'quotes', a term (contrary to what stuffy people will try to tell you) that has in fact been around for over a century.
These marks tell us that the words they enclose are to be attributed to someone else, that they belong to the realm of quoting. And though, like some of the contemporary British observers, we are sometimes uncertain exactly how these marks work, there is also an acceptance that there are established rules for using them, authorised by the powerful schooled tradition.
Quotation marks also play a significant part in the influential contrast between repeating someone's exact words and rephrasing them more indirectly. As unambiguously formulated in a standard grammar book, to 'put quotes around anything other than a word-forward repetition... is wrong' (Trask 1997: 96, bold in the original).
This radical distinction between direct verbatim repetition and indirect reformulation lies, it seems, at the root of the system into which we were drilled as children and students.
With this background it is easy to take quote marks for granted without being particularly aware of them - as indeed was also the case for many of the British commentators reported in the last chapter. Once learned, they seemingly acquire a kind of universal validity attesting to the distinctiveness of 'quotation'.
The interlinked distinction between direct and reported speech and its relation to the presence or absence of quote marks similarly seem built into the foundations of language and of logic. But the conventions we follow (or think we follow) today have not after all been immutable.
What are quote marks anyway, and is there a correct way to use them?
So, how has it come about that these little marks now apparently hold such sway? What can account for the officially-authorised dominance of quotation marks but at the same time the variety of formats and usages? And how could the Oxford English Dictionary record the first meaning of our now common English word 'quotation' as, of all things, a 'marginal', and the verb 'quote' as having started as something to do with numbering?
And how are they - should they be - used and how did they come about?
Actually no one knows how the practice of quoting arose, most likely it was there from the very start, voices relaying messages of triumph, of command, allegiance, even perhaps of love. Indeed, some have seen quoting, and its outward signs, as one of the great achievements of human history, of being human.
What we do know something of however is how written quote marks developed over many centuries of the western written traditions - a more limited topic, but well worth exploring.
They have a long and surprising history, a history that throws some light on the nature and vicissitudes of quoting and the striking variations in the ways it is signalled.
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