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Friday, May 9, 2008

Criminal Sentence 14: Overusing quotation marks

From an ad for male incontinence (which I read with great interest! Actually it was a huge headline, so I noticed it):

Up at night having to "go"?

No quotation marks necessary. Sometimes writers like to highlight a word that is somewhat colloquial by using quotation marks, but you don't need to do that. If you want to highlight something, all caps, italics or underlining might be appropriate. But use sparingly!

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