Re: Single vs double quotes?

[Grail <talthane -at- mac -dot- com>]

I'm not convinced that this generalisation is the case (about which side 
of the Atlantic uses which quotes). Certainly 'respected' news sites 
such as the Times and the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/) quote statements 
by starting and ending with double quotes. Most fiction books that are 
stored in my desk at work at the moment have lines of dialogue that use 
double quotes at the start and end, sometimes with single quotes in 
between the two. When I'm proofreading something, I would instinctively 
'correct' a quotation that worked the opposite way round.

I think the difference lies in whether you're quoting speech or not. I'd 
suggest British English generally uses double quotes for speech ("Let's 
go to the beach," Jane suggested) but single quotes for things like 
scare quotes ('respected' news sites).

The way Geoff describes might have been the way British English worked 
in olden days, of course - I can't speak for that.

But then, I was told - by a woman from Alabama, so anyone who wants to 
make Deep South jokes can have a field day now - that American English 
writers place punctuation marks outside of the quotation marks (Let's go 
to the beach", Jane suggested) . In British English, that's regarded as 
completely wrong. (So is the American English practice of including an 
entire sentence in brackets, like this.)

Best not to assume what one side of the Atlantic does if you're living 
on the other, in my view.

Incidentally, Russian uses the chevron symbols too, but possessives 
don't use apostrophes.

-Grail

Hart, Geoff wrote: