by Chris Pearce

Created on: November 15, 2011

Quotation marks, also called quote marks, quotes, speech marks or inverted commas, are used in a number of situations. Their main use is to show the start and end of direct speech and passages by other writers. They are also used for the title of certain works and for various terms.

Direct speech should always be enclosed with quotation marks. For example: “I don’t think we should go in there,” Joan said. Also, “The last time we were here,” he said, “the door was locked fast.” Note that the marks go around only those words that were actually spoken. Commas and periods are usually placed inside the quote marks. No quotes are used for indirect speech, such as: He said that we could go inside after our tickets are confirmed.

Any passage of text by another writer should be enclosed in quotation marks, such as in the following example. According to Adams, the government “did not get serious about secondary education until well into the 1950s.” If the statement is paraphrased rather than quoted directly, then quote marks would not be used. In this case, the writer might say something like: Adams felt that the government didn’t do much towards secondary education before the late 1950s (but still cite the source).

Other uses of quotation marks are to enclose the title of an unpublished work, a chapter of a book, a journal article, a newspaper or magazine article, a lecture, an essay, a poem and a song.

Titles of unpublished works are usually enclosed with quotes. For example: His thesis for his master degree was called “A Sociological Study of Urban Legends.” Similarly, the chapter name of a book has quotation marks. For example: The second chapter, “Crime rates in other countries,” compares crime in the main OECD countries outside North America. Note that italic is used for the titles of published works and names of newspapers and journals rather than quote marks. A lecture or paper has quotation marks, for example: Brown will deliver a paper, “Are we drowning in phoney statistics?”, at the forthcoming conference. For poems: She read her poem, “Street fighter,” at the poetry festival.

Quote marks can also be used for technical terms, for specially coined phrases or words, to show irony, and for things like colloquialisms and nicknames.

Technical terms are often enclosed in quotes, for example: The term “condylar resorption” describes a type of joint

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