I Know You Were Uncomfortable About This, Too
It took me awhile to recognize how the British and Americans differ in their use of punctuation. I thought I had it down, but I noticed that sometimes my students were still using single quotes in their writing, mixed in with American-style double quotes. Usually I just circled these, maybe noted something about how we don’t live in the UK. Then today I saw an article in The New York Times that used single quotes, so I thought I’d look up the rule. This is new information to me, so maybe you’ll find it useful too:
[A]ccording to the Chicago Manual of Style: in philosophical discourse, key concepts may be set apart with single-quote marks. When such concepts are set off in this way, periods and commas go outside the single-quote marks:
- Sartre’s treatment of ‘being’, as opposed to his treatment of ‘non-being’, has been thoroughly described in Kaufmann’s book.
Nothing pithy to say here. Just doing my part to make us all better writers.
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>