confusion

Quotation marks never create emphasis. They only cause confusion. Are you using yours properly?

It makes me smile every time I see bungled quotation marks on store signage, business marketing materials, or even in personal communications. Please don’t continue this downward trend. If you want to emphasize your language, use bold, italics, an underline, or even surround something with *asterisks* if you must, but do not—I beg you—use quotation marks.

Besides where to put them around other punctuation and when to use single versus double quotes (which we’ve already covered), here’s …More