I take quoting seriously. Here’s how I quote, and how to read my quotes.

I use double quotation marks (“”) for literal quotes only.

I use single quotation marks (‘’) for anything else, such as scare quotes, titles of essays, etc. I use italics for titles of books or movies.

I think I got the idea to use single vs double quotes for these different purposes from David Deutsch when we worked on translating his book The Beginning of Infinity into German. It’s the rule we ended up following in the translation, except with double guillemets (»«) for literal quotes and (›‹) for anything else.

For omissions inside quotes, I use bracketed ellipses (‘[…]’ instead of just ‘…’). I prefer brackets because they eliminate ambiguity: standalone ellipses are often used in regular text, outside of quotes. They can mean trailing-off thoughts, pauses in speech, etc. But when surrounded by brackets, they can only indicate omissions.

It’s customary in America to put commas and periods at the end of, and inside, quotes. For example: ‘“It’s cold,” she said.’ I don’t do that unless the quote itself ends in such punctuation. If it doesn’t, I put the comma outside the quotation: ‘“It’s cold”, she said.’ I think that’s how the British do it.

For both single and double quotation marks, I prefer using the curly ones over straight ones. Same for apostrophes. My markdown parser automatically turns straight quotation marks and apostrophes into curly ones, leading to slight changes in quotes containing the straight versions. I don’t consider that a big deal.

For quotes within quotes, I alternate single and double quotation marks, as deeply nested as necessary, unless I make it a blockquote. This approach increases clarity because following an opening double quotation mark by another may confuse readers. For example, if a quote contains double quotation marks, I will replace them with single quotation marks. If, inside of the latter marks, the quote uses single quotation marks, I will replace them with double ones. And so on.

For source format, I don’t follow any particular style guide religiously, but I’m loosely inspired by Chicago.

My older writings don’t always adhere to these rules, but my most recent articles (last couple of years at least) should.

For my German-speaking audience: when I write German texts, I follow all the same rules, except I use guillemets instead of quotation marks, as indicated above.

I built and run Quote Checker. It helps people quote accurately. I use it for my own writing and I recommend that you use it, too.