Right. i have been taught in school that "" are speech marks. why in novels do they use ' instead? is this just something to do with printing or am i doing it wrong?
Right. i have been taught in school that "" are speech marks. why in novels do they use ' instead? is this just something to do with printing or am i doing it wrong?
The simplest answer is open the type of novel you like to read and see which is used and that is the correct style for that publishing house. Other publishing houses may differ so if you are submitting look at something recently published by that house. It's not worth worrying about, good writing is good writing and bad writing is bad writing; the wrong sort of quotation marks is not going to make a decision about publication for a publisher.
As far as I know, both are acceptable. Sometimes both are necessary. For example, if you wrote: ""Jill said to tell you "Hi"," said John.", it could be be a bit confusing. So you alternate " and ': "Jill said to tell you 'Hi'," said John.
In the same way, you use [] inside of () - and if necessary use {} as well - in order not to confuse:
I was on my way to Montmartre (where my grandmother [the one who had worked in the fish factory {which exploded unexpectedly on a weekend}] lived), when I saw Michel.
Compare: I was on my way to Montmartre (where my grandmother (the one who had worked in the fish factory (which exploded unexpectedly on a weekend)) lived), when I saw Michel.
My own question is: If ' is followed immediately by ", or vice versa, should we leave a space?
" 'Banjax' is an interesting word, don't you think?" asked Scout. As opposed to
"'Banjax' is an interesting word, don't you think?" asked Scout.
But back to your question: Why do many novels use " ' " IN PREFERENCE TO " " "?
I can offer 2 possibilities:
a) Because writers are getting lazy. On my keyboard (which seems to be the standard British keyboard [I can tell that it's British, because it offers "£" AS WELL AS "$"]), it only takes one finger to produce ', whereas I have to use TWO fingers (for the shift key and the 2 key) to produce ".
b) Because publishers are not only concerned about their profits/investment ratio, but also about the environment. Consider this: How many hundreds (or thousands) of times will a " appear in a novel? How many hundreds (or thousands) of that novel are going to be printed? How many dozens of novels is a certain publishing house going to have printed every year? So how much ink is going to be saved if they print millions of 's instead of millions of "s?
If the latter reason is the correct one, I can only applaud. Less fossil fuels used up, less contamination of this planet. But I doubt that that's the reason. If publishers were so concerned about the environment, they could make a much more important contribution by suppressing the 3 or 4 (or more) blank pages at the beginning and end of their books. Who reads these blank pages, anyway? I know that I don't. Do you? Thousands of trees are being sawed down each year just to supply the paper for these blank pages. Not to mention the awful contamination of paper factories.
So maybe it's because of laziness. The kind of laziness that makes people write: "But I doubt that's the reason" instead of "But I doubt that that's the reason". The kind of laziness that caused the Yanks to say (and write) "a billion" instead of "a thousand million". (And now the Brits are copying them, kowtowing* to the Yanks, losing step with every other language that I know of [with the exception of French] in which "billion" still means "million million". This causes havoc and misunderstanding in translations, I can tell you. (According to one such misunderstanding, a Spanish radio program announced some spurious figure for the amount of money spent on "ecological" [i.e. organically-grown] food in Europe, which translated as over 10,000 euros/year for EACH human being: adult AND child. The trouble is that some translators are working under the assumption that the British "billion" still means what it used to.) HEY, maybe both of those cases are to spare ink and save the planet, as well! I've never thought of that before now.
* Just as an exercise in the ridiculous: I originally wrote "kow-towing" instead of "kowtowing". The Internet spelling check (also Yank, of course: it always wants to correct "colour" to "color", etc.) does NOT offer "kowtowing" as a correction. Instead it offers "chow-towing", "low-towing", "ow-towing", "kw-towing", and "wok-towing". The hyphen may NOT be sacrificed!
Hi Christian,
You're doing it right unless your publisher tells you to do it otherwise.
Usually inverted commas come in pairs; quotation marks are singles. However, this can be reversed according to house style. The important thing is to choose one way and stick to it throughout: speech in doubles and quotes in singles, or speech in singles and quotes in doubles. Don't mix the two.
If you are sending a piece of work to a magazine or a publishing house, it's a good idea to check which convention they use, and to follow suit. It may get you ahead of the queue if the competition hasn't taken the time to do it.
Lorraine