A Word, Please: The ease of using single quotation marks

By June Casagrande

March 25, 2016 4:26 PM PT

The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that should be “five carrots and three kiwis”), and those books have made millions.

People who know the difference between “it’s” and “its” — don’t get them started on the people who don’t know the difference. (“It’s” with an apostrophe means either “it is” or “it has.” To show possession, as in “the dog wagged its tail,” use “its” with no apostrophe.)

But in my experience, the biggest pest in punctuation isn’t the apostrophe. It’s the single quotation mark. Sometimes it seems that no one knows how to use it, including a lot of professional editors.

These folks usually have no problem with regular quotation marks. But when it comes to the single ones, they get tripped up — as if there’s some mystery to using single quote marks that baffles even those who’ve mastered the regular ones.

There isn’t. Single quotation marks follow the same rules as regular quotation marks. The only difference is that the single ones operate within double quotation marks. They’re for quotations inside other quotations: Joe said, “Mary said, ‘Hi.’”

That’s it. No tricks. There’s just one exception to the basic rule, which may be a source of many people’s confusion: In publishing, single quotation marks are used in place of regular quotations in headlines. So a news story that reports that a candidate said, “Read my lips” would, in the headline, have ‘Read my lips.’

Most writers never have to worry about that because they’re not writing headlines. For them, the rules are simple and straightforward. Yet confusion about single quote marks abounds. So, here are some common mistakes you’ll want to avoid.

Many writers seem to think that the single quotation mark is a perfect choice anytime you sort of want quotation marks, but also sort of don’t: The word ‘legend’ gets thrown around a lot.

It’s as if they think single quote marks are a lo-cal version of the real thing. Quotation marks lite. Not so.

When you want to call out a word to talk about it, that’s a job for real quotation marks — the word “legend” gets thrown around a lot — unless, of course, it’s inside a larger quotation — Krusty the Clown said, “The word ‘legend’ gets thrown around a lot.”

Most people don’t know that, in American English, a period or comma always comes before a closing quotation mark. But even people who know that rule often don’t realize it works the same way with single quote marks: Krusty said, “One word that gets thrown around a lot is ‘legend’.” That’s wrong. That sentence should end with ‘legend.’”

If the sentence ended with an apostrophe — a mark that appears identical to a closing single quote mark — that would be different: Farmer John said, “Stop cussin’.”

That’s because the apostrophe represents a letter — a part of the word that’s been dropped, in this case, the letter G. So the apostrophe functions as part of the word, inseparable from it. But unlike the apostrophe, the single quote mark isn’t part of the word.

In the rare cases when you have a quotation within a quotation within another quotation, use double and single quotation marks alternately, like this: Bob said, “Jenny murmured, ‘Stop using the word “babe.”’”

Here, “babe” is within a Jenny quote that’s within a Bob quote. So the sentence ends with a double quotation mark, followed by a single, followed by another double. The period comes before all of them.

Luckily, sentences that clumsy don’t come up much. In most cases, single quotation marks are easy to manage.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.