SOME British readers might wonder why a London-based publication uses double inverted commas like "these". And some American readers may wonder why commas and full stops (er, periods) sometimes appear ...

Inverted commas are used to show direct speech. They are also known as speech marks. They are placed before and after the exact words a character says. “Shall we go to Grandpa’s house?” asked Sally.

AS THE question implies, to describe quotation marks as inverted commas is only half true. The reason is that printed characters have evolved from hand scripts. If you draw curved quotation marks by ...

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...