Punctuation is Not a Personal Preference!

Everywhere I look lately, I see single quotation marks. Why? No one knows! This is not proper, people, and it must be stopped. I asked one Fourth Wave contributor why they were using a single quotation mark around some words instead of the standard two quotation marks (note the plural), and they said “I’m using them to denote arcane words people may not have heard of.”

But guess what? Punctuation is not a personal preference! You cannot use quotation marks to denote any silly thing you please. That’s like saying “I’m using the word ‘cat’ to mean ‘dog.’” It’s not acceptable. It doesn’t communicate effectively. There are rules. They should be followed.

Here are the rules re: quotation marks

When quoting a person, or anything really, use the double quotation mark, like this: “She told me she was a really good writer who knew how to use quotation marks correctly.”

The single quotation mark has only one purpose. That is to denote a quote within a quote (see paragraph two above). So, for example, “She said she would never use the word ‘cat’ to mean ‘dog,’ because that would be a confusing and egregious error!”