I don’t know if anyone’s ever noticed. But I use the convention of the single quote marks instead of the more American double quote marks. (And BTW I definitely am American [Michigander*].)
It actually started about 20 years ago when I joined these boards. When I first used quote marks in my Wordpad records of posts, only single quotes were accepted. But actually as time went on, I came to like it.
You know the British have a very sensible system that starts with the single quote marks. Then a quote within a quote is double. And a quote within a quote within a quote is triple. It just goes on like that.
Thoughts (if any)?
Yeah, try explaining a word like ‘Michigander’ to an Australian or a Brit.
I imagine I would say “It’s the word for someone from Michigan” or “It’s the demonym for Michigan” and they would nod in understanding. I would expect a lot more trouble explaining Mancunian to an American.
And no, I’ve never noticed your use of single quotes.
Cite? I’m British, and this is the first I’ve heard of it. I wasn’t aware that the use of single quotation marks is more common in the U.K. And I’ve never seen triple quotation marks. The only convention I’m aware of is that when nesting quotation marks the inside set is different from the outside set (single/double or double/single).
I’m a typesetter/publishing and many times I have to convert UK books to US. That includes changing the single quotes to doubles and vice versa, and putting the punctuation (i.e., commas and periods) before the closing quote. And changing spaced en dashes to regular em dashes, as well as fixing ellipses to spaced ellipses rather than the single ellipse keystroke. And a bit of fixing British spelling to U.S.
I’m currently reading a British book and I keep finding that my eye skips over the single quote mark so that I miss when a quote begins and ends. That may just be a matter of personal inexperience with them, but even when I go back and find my place the single quote is often hard to spot. (Maybe the font used is a poor one as well.)
Like Riemann, I’ve never encountered triple quotes. The convention is always single, then double, then single, the converse of the American double, then single, then double. Even if you mean something like, “The Pope issued a document called a ‘bull’”, that’s not a triple quote but a consecutive single and double.
Neither convention makes more sense than the other; it’s all in what you’re used to.
To try and avoid that sort of thing, I’ve recently decided to experiment with putting the punctuation between the quotes in that situation when doing so would not confuse, e.g. “The Pope issued a document called a ‘bull’.” Otherwise, I use a thin space, e.g., "When I saw him at a distance, I shouted ‘Hello!’ "
@Riemann A teacher told us about the ‘, ‘’ and ‘’’. So obviously I have no cite. No, the use for triple quote marks rarely comes up. So that could be why few have heard of it. But is the established use.
I don’t know why you never heard of the single quote thing (if I understood you correctly). I often read British books, websites and the like. And they always use single quotes. I know US writers and British often use each other’s writing systems, spellings, etc. Maybe that is what you are talking about.
Me, I think the single quote convention is just easier and makes more sense.
Established where and by who? If you were just told this by a teacher and don’t have a cite, why are you so certain it is “the established use”? Could it instead be that few have heard of it because your teacher was mistaken or taught based on an uncommon and obscure style guide?
This is technically true for Norway, for instance. And when I switch my phone keyboard to Norwegian, that’s the main quotation marks available. But I never learned about these quotation marks in school. They are not in general use in handwriting, weren’t on your average type writer and aren’t on computer keyboards. Until word processors got “smart quotes” they were restricted to the domain of professional typesetting.
MLA style is also what’s standard across most style guides:
Two Levels of Nesting
If the quotation enclosed in single marks also contains material–whether another quotation or the title of a work–that needs to be set off with quotation marks, use double quotation marks around that material. The pattern is double, single, double quotation marks. In other words, nest punctuation within punctuation and alternate to disambiguate:
“[Mr. Lawson] called out the name [Gogol] in a perfectly reasonable way, without pause, without doubt, without a suppressed smile, just as he had called out Brian and Erica and Tom. And then: ‘Well, we’re going to have to read “The Overcoat.” Either that or “The Nose”’” (Lahiri 89).
as a matter of interest, in Britain we usually do it the second way Max_Eliott mentioned - single quotation marks on the outside, double quotation marks for nested quotations. But I’ve never seen triple quotes.
Again, I have also literally never seen triple quotes used in either American or British usage. I would remember such an outlier. I have to assume that either you are remembering it wrongly, or confusing the term with the use of adjacent single and double quotes, or, very likely, your teacher was wrong to begin with. My standard rule of thumb is that if you still quote something an English teacher told you about English in high school you’re repeating nonsense. The “rules” that are taught to students are there to make them conform, not to understand the language, since none of the “rules” are actually rules.
@Exapno_Mapcase It was actually a college professor, not a high court teacher. I trusted her statements then, and I trust them now, even though triple quote marks as practical matter may rarely come up. And I don’t want to sound snippy. But I still stand by my statements .
Get as snippy as you want, but unless you can cite real world examples of the use of triple quotation marks, we can dismiss this without further consideration, along the with alternative ending to Big.
How would this even work? No keyboard I have ever seen has any way to generate a triple quotation mark.
Perhaps you are misremembering what happens when nested quotations are opened or closed in the same position, where you would have consecutive single and double quotation marks with a small space between.
