QT 12 – Video Transcript and Bonus Info
Welcome to 2-Minute Tuesday and a QuickTake about quotation marks, with a little help from the POEtry of Poe.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” the raven—who is outside—comes inside when the narrator opens the chamber door.
Outside or inside? That’s the question many people have about the period at the end of a quotation.
The answer depends on which side of the Atlantic you live. Here’s a hint, though: Poe was an American author.
But first, quotation marks have several purposes—to quote someone, to draw attention to a word, to mark titles of short works, for example, TV shows, magazine articles, and poems, such as “The Raven.”
What Americans call quotation marks, the British call “inverted commas,” because they use single marks while we use double marks. Already, things are off to a contrary start!
In American English, we use double quotation marks to enclose a quote and single quotation marks to quote within a quote. The British do the opposite: single quotation marks first and double quotation marks for the quote within the quote. For a quote within a quote within a quote, we revert to double. The British revert to single.
Whoa—there is entirely too much quoting going on around here!
So how do we punctuate quoted material that comes at the end of the sentence? Does the period go on the inside or on the outside of the closing quotation marks? Or, to put it more sinisterly, did the raven come inside or stay outside? Yep, inside!
American convention dictates that our periods go on the inside of the closing quotation marks. Always. No exceptions. British convention generally places the periods outside the closing quotation marks. The same conventions hold true for commas. In American English, commas go inside the closing quotation marks; in British English, they go outside.
You don’t like it? You think it looks funny to see two little squiggly marks suspended mid-air? You’d rather be British? Hey, we had a revolution for a reason!
What about colons? Semicolons? Question marks and exclamation points? We’ll save that discussion for another two-minute video. Right now, I hear a tap, tap, tapping on my chamber door. Quothe the Raven, “Nevermore.”
The rest of the story:
Quotation marks have three main functions: (1) to indicate the use of someone else’s exact words, (2) to set off words and phrases for special emphasis, and (3) to mark the titles of literary and artistic works. (The Gregg Reference Manual )
We use quotation marks to enclose a direct quotation (the exact words of a speaker or writer). We do not use them for an indirect quotation (a restatement or paraphrase of another’s words). Keep in mind that you may not alter in any way direct quotes. If a word is misspelled in the original source, for example, you cannot correct it. If you don’t want to quote the misspelling, you can paraphrase the quotation to reflect the correct spelling. Or if you must, you can insert the Latin term sic in square brackets immediately after the misspelling (or error). “Sic” means “thus it was in the original source”—that is to say, “I didn’t make that error.”
The newspaper reported the accident as “the peek [sic] of carelessness.” (should be “peak.”)
The newspaper reported that the accident reflected the height of carelessness.
For those of you interested in what has come to be known as scare quotes, here is an interesting article: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/the-scare-quote-2016-in-a-punctuation-mark/511319/