Quote marks are satisfying to me. Unlike the “who/whom” business for example – the rules on how to use quote marks make intuitive sense – to me, at least!
Most people know the first quote rule: if the words are exactly what someone said or wrote, put them in quotes. There are exceptions to this (is there a grammar rule without exceptions?), but it’s a start. The issue of plagiarism may come to mind, but that is a topic whose complexity merits its own blog.
Back to the simplicity of quote marks.
Double quotes
Use double quotes (these “) around short to medium-length quotations.
The man said, “Bring me an apple.”
One study participant noted, “I would not want to do this again.”
He said he would “never do that again.”
Block quotes
If you want to use a longer quote (APA style says 40+ words) you format it as a block quote.
With a block quote, you DO NOT use quote marks. Instead, you start the quote on a separate line (indented 1/2 inch from the left margin).
Each subsequent line of that quote lines up with the initial line.
The quote’s introductory line should end with a period or colon, not a comma.
This is perhaps most famous part of the speech Churchill made to Parliament on May 13, 1940:
I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
Onward.
Introducing an ordinary (not block) quote: Comma or no comma?
If the preceding word is the sentence’s primary verb, put a comma after it.
Another way to think about this is whether the preceding words are the “attribution” of the quote, that is, the phrase that tells you who said (or hissed, or shouted, etc.) the quoted words:
She said, “I found the answer!”
I responded, “I don’t think you did.”
Quotes that “run in” to the sentence
If your introduction to a quote includes “that,” you’re not going to use the comma:
He said the statement was “simply not correct.”
She said that the boss was “a problem.”
Quote within a quote
Sometimes you’ll find what is called a “quote within a quote.”
Here, place single quotes (this ‘) on the inside.
Place exterior quotes (this “) on the outside.
He said that he “will not forego the opportunity to ‘offer…blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'”
The three dots in the example above are called an ellipsis, and are used to indicate words left out of the middle of the quote.
There we begin to enter the treacherous territory of actually using quotes, tricks such as when to use a four-point ellipsis, how to incorporate a comma with an ellipsis, and on and on.
In this short – and I hope simple – list of samples we’ll avoid those topics, too.
Punctuation: Inside or outside the quotes?
There is one final point, and it’s one of my favorites, partly because it’s done incorrectly so often.
Please, please put ending punctuation inside the quote marks. (If you want the exception to that, it’s the semicolon, but that occurrence is rarer than a clear grammar rule!)
“Man the fort,” he said. “We will prevail, or die trying!”
He quoted Churchill accurately, saying, “Man the fort; we have nothing to offer but ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'”
A final thought, occasioned by Churchill’s eloquence: punctuation and its companion grammar, as demonstrated above, can confuse and challenge the best of us. But we can look to Churchill’s words – not the punctuation surrounding them – to find what really matters.
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