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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What grammatical device to I use to differentiate literal quotations and text written as quotations for stylistic/artistic reasons?

Sometimes an idea is best conveyed as if it were a snippet of a conversation.

I’ve seen curly single quotes (the right one is also the «good» apostrophe) used for nested quotes (I'd have preferred „…“, but alas) and also for ‘paraphrases’ or sarcasm. So that may be a legible mark for quote-like pieces of text with extra features.

In general, I recommend looking into stylistic guides and picking an approach to use consistently. Best of all to go with something ubiquitous, i.e. suggestions common for Chicago and AP style, because people are already primed for it by experience of reading posh outlets with professional editors, so they have both the skill for parsing it on the fly and the subconscious association of such style with a respectable source.

Or you could go the opposite way, using less common quotation marks like «» or something for paraphrases.