Why is the word milquetoast in quotation marks
How to Use Quotation Marks | Grammar Lessons
I like to think of the quotation mark as
the punctuation that can save your job
or save your grade in the class and
that's because we use a quotation mark
to attribute ideas and words to the
original speaker so you use a quotation
mark to show that someone else has said
something either verbally or they've
written it on the page and if you don't
use the quotation mark when you are you
know duplicating someone's work is what
we call plagiarism we definitely want to
avoid that grammatically speaking
punctuating the quotation mark can be a
little bit tricky so I'll show you a few
examples quotation marks often take two
forms will either lead with the
quotation and give the attribution at
the end of the sentence or will lead
with the attribution and end with the
quotation so here's an example of how to
punctuate a sentence where we lead with
the quotation we have it's a lovely day
Jim said well in this case notice that
we start with the quotation mark we
capitalize the first word and we keep
the comma inside of the quotation mark
in other words we tuck the punctuation
inside of those quotes and then we give
the attribution Jim said and the period
doesn't come until the very end of the
sentence
now in this sentence we've flipped the
order and we're starting with the
attribution so we say Jim said we
capitalize J because it's the beginning
of the sentence and this time we put the
comma after said and then we launch into
the quote so Jim said comma quotation
mark capital it's a lovely day period
quotation mark can be a little tricky
because sometimes the comma goes inside
of the quotation sometimes it goes
outside and depends on how you're
setting your sentence up so let's say
that it's such a nice day out that Jim
tells his co-workers he's sick and he
gets out of the office for the day well
I might say something like Jim said he
was feeling sick but we're skeptical so
you can see that this is taken on a
different form because we're only
quoting a small part of something that
Jim said not a complete sentence and
we're tucking it into our sentence so
that even without the quotation marks it
would read well it would read as a
complete sentence Jim said he was
feeling sick but we're skeptical so in
this case you can put the quotations
around his partial quote and you don't
have to capitalize the first word of his
quote I hope that this makes using
quotation marks a little bit clearer for
you
you
