The incredibly treacherous single quotation mark

 

Single quotation marks are hard. Lately, it seems they’re practically impossible. More and more I see professional editors and professionally published writing use them wrong.

To get an idea of how these little marks are confounding even professional users of punctuation, look at the following two sentences.

“Jessie just looked at me and said, ‘Goodbye,'” Ben said.

“That house is the Smiths’,” Stephanie said.

Note the punctuation at the end of each quotation. Care to guess which is correct? Is it the example where both punctuation marks come after the comma? Or is it the example in which the comma sits between the two other punctuation marks?

Answer: It was a trick question. Both are punctuated correctly. My recent column explains why.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2020 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.