Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Quotation Marks

There are many ways to go wrong with quotation marks. They are often used ironically:

She ran around with a bunch of “intellectuals.”

The quotation marks around “intellectuals” indicate that the writer believes that these are in fact so-called intellectuals, not real intellectuals at all.

Advertisers unfortunately tend to use quotation marks merely for emphasis:

“FRESH” TOMATOES
59 CENTS A POUND

The influence of the more common ironic usage tends to make the reader question whether these tomatoes are really fresh.

In American usage, single quotation marks are used normally only for quoted words and phrases within quotations.

British usage has traditionally been to reverse this relationship, with single quotation marks being standard and double ones being used only for quotations within quotations.

Titles of books and other long works that might be printed as books are usually italicized (except, for some reason, in newspapers); but the titles of short poems, stories, essays, and other works that would be more commonly printed within larger works (anthologies, collections, periodicals, etc.) are enclosed in quotation marks.


http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/quotation_marks.html