Quotation marks are used to set off a person's words, whether spoken or written. They are placed at both the beginning and end of the quote. Ex: Sue remarked, "I'll meet you at the movies," A comma is ...

Punctuation basics are easy. A period ends a sentence. A comma represents a pause. A quotation mark indicates a quotation. An apostrophe shows possession. Most people get that. But the finer points — ...

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Everyone knows that there’s only one use for single quotation marks, and that’s to denote a quote ...

We all know someone who uses air quotes in conversation, and we often mock this person. Comedian Chris Farley did a classic skit on “Saturday Night Live” about a goofy guy who uses air quotes for ...

I think that Donald Trump has invented a new use for quotation marks. In several now-famous tweets, the president accused Barack Obama of wiretapping him during the election. Trump used quotation ...

Picture this: A music reviewer makes a reference to the song “Space Truckin’” by Deep Purple. You want to quote him on it. Specifically, you want to quote a sentence in which the writer just happened ...

Another annoying journalistic tic: the single-word quotation. I suppose that what, if anything, is in the reporter’s mind is an impulse to indicate that the subject’s exact words are being quoted. But ...