Using the Quotation Marks
Quotation marks enclose speech, quoted text and titles, and they come in two families: the straight marks on your keyboard (" and ') and the curly, typographically correct marks (“ ” and ‘ ’). Word processors, phones and most content editors convert straight to curly as you type, which is why the pretty version appears in a document even though only the plain one is on the keys.
Curly versus straight
Curly quotes are directional: the opening mark curls toward the text like a tiny 66 and the closing one like a 99. Straight quotes are a typewriter compromise that saved a key. Use curly marks in anything a reader will see — documents, websites, captions — and straight marks only in code, where a curly quote is a syntax error. That distinction is the source of the most common bug when copying a command from a web page into a terminal: the page's editor "smartened" the quotes and the shell no longer understands them.
American and British conventions
American style uses double marks for a quotation and single marks for a quote inside it: “She said ‘no’ twice.” British style reverses that: ‘She said “no” twice.’ Americans also put commas and periods inside the closing mark regardless of logic, while British writers place punctuation inside only when it belongs to the quoted words. Neither is wrong; match your audience and stay consistent.
Other languages
- German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian open low and close high: „so“.
- French uses guillemets with a thin space inside: « comme ça ».
- Spanish, Italian, Russian also use « » but without the inner spaces.
- Swiss German uses guillemets pointing inward: «so».
- Japanese and traditional Chinese use corner brackets 「so」.
The right single quotation mark ’ doubles as the apostrophe, so it is by far the most common of these characters: it appears in don’t, it’s and the ’90s. A frequent mistake is the opening mark in a leading apostrophe (‘90s), which smart-quote features get wrong because they see a space before it.
Typing them
Mac users have direct shortcuts: Option + [ and Option + Shift + [ for the double pair, Option + ] and Option + Shift + ] for the single pair. Windows uses Alt + 0147 through Alt + 0148 and 0145 through 0146. On a phone, hold the " or ' key and the whole set slides out, including „ and « ». The curly marks are part of Windows-1252 and Mac Roman, so they render everywhere, while the corner brackets need a font with East Asian coverage.
Aesthetic use
Instagram bios and TikTok profiles wrap a motto in curly quotes to turn it into a "quote-style" bio, and dreamy captions pair a quoted line with an ellipsis or an em dash before the attribution. Guillemets « » are popular as arrow-like decorations in display names, and a calligraphy font between a pair of curly quotes is a common aesthetic layout.