When are quotes “unnecessary”?
Each semester, students in my editing classes at the University of Minnesota Duluth head into the world in search of grammatical errors they encounter in public writing of all kinds. The idea of the grammar hunt (taken from Emilie Davis of Syracuse University), is to get students to develop an eye for reading with scrutiny. The results of years of grammar hunts have taught me that some of the most common errors seem to come from two tricky punctuation marks: apostrophes and quotations.
People just don’t seem to know when or how to use them. Recently, someone turned me on to a blog that provides wonderful examples. Appropriately named the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, the site is dedicated to visual examples of the very strange ways people employ quotation marks.
You can peruse for your own favorites. I personally like the handcrafted storage jar with the label “cheese.” Is the implication here that what is inside may or may not be cheese or that this cheese is somehow tainted? I know many food products can’t call themselves cheese because of some kind of grand cheese standard, so perhaps that’s where these are stored. Needless to say, whatever is in there, I’m not having any on my cracker.
The blog does a wonderful job of showing the ways quotes get misused and abused and, in the process, lose all power and effect. There seem to be a few common ways that quotes get “mistreated” (Couldn’t resist, sorry. Last one. Well, probably.).
Most of the blog entries seem to show quotes that people used when they really wanted to emphasize a particular word. So, maybe they just lacked the ability to italicize? Hard to say. But putting a word in quotation really just means one thing: someone said it.
Another way quotation marks are often used is in the dreaded partial quote. As the Associated Press Stylebook notes, these are to be used only sparingly and as a last resort. The danger — or at least one of them — is that the partial quote combined with whatever the writer or editor paraphrased will alter the meaning in some substantial way. The worst of all partial quotes is the single word partial quote because often they seem to be used by writers to suggest that there is some skepticism about what the author is “saying.” (OK. That’s really my last one, but that time I think it demonstrated my point — right?).
The quote can bring life and passion to our writing, but, as with any writing tool, if we go to it too often or use it improperly, it becomes a rather useless piece of noise that the reader starts to ignore or look past. There, I really wanted to throw some quotes in that last sentence but resisted. I think I showed great “restraint” there, don’t you?
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