Wait, Quotation Marks Can’t Be Used to Highlight Information?
All-you-can-eat sushi!
All-you-can-eat “sushi”!
What’s the difference between the two phrases above? It’s the difference between real, quality ingredients made from fresh, edible goodness and, well, some mysterious concoction that may or may not do your bowels any favors four hours after eating it. Those quotation marks make a huge difference in meaning. Sadly, quotation marks get messed up all the time; they’re often mistakenly used with the intention to emphasize something but, sadly (or humorously, depending on your perspective), quotation marks just don’t work for emphasis.
Quotation marks were created to do a few basic things:
- directly quote someone verbatim (Charles suddenly gasped, “Wow, look at that enormous hedgehog!”);
- call out a word as a word in a sentence or to give the definition of a word (the definition of “crepusculous” is “having to do with twilight”);
- make note of a short media piece, like an article, song, or a TV show (I just watched my favorite episode of The Office: “Safety Training”); or
- communicate snarkiness, sarcasm, or irony in a sentence (Whenever I call you, you seem to be “tied up” with important “work” things).
But quotation marks should never, EVER be used to highlight information. Why? Well, check out these images and see if you see the problem:
Misused quotation marks have the ability to make you, your company, or your product look super silly. Don’t ever use them to highlight information!! When you do, you end up showing snarkiness, irony, and sarcasm. And that’s probably not what you want when you’re emphasizing certain ideas.
So, you might ask, how CAN you highlight information, if not with quotation marks? There are all kinds of options:
- Change the color
- Make the font bigger
- Switch from lower case to ALL CAPS
- Switch fonts
- Increase the weight of the letters
- Underline text
- Use spacing to separate information
- Use italics
- Combine two or three of these
But don’t use quotation marks!