The marks of quotation are perhaps the
easiest marks of punctuation to use, yet so often they lead only to destruction. You
know what else leads to destruction? Walking on your face.
Compare man walking on his face with man walking on his feet.
Silly, yes? That's because it's
easy to walk on your feet, and impossible to walk on your face. For starters,
you'd need to have two faces so that your weight can always be on one face while the
other takes a step forward. As it happens, we don't possess the required amount of faces, so we'd have to sort of face-hop from
place to place. I imagine the process would be rather destructive.
Fortunately it's easy to walk on
your feet and not on your face. All you have to remember, when you get up in the
morning, is not to walk upside-down.
But there's another reason why we
walk on our feet and not on our faces. It makes us look more intelligent. Therefore, walking intelligently is easy. The criteria is as
follows:
1. Don’t walk on your face.
You know what else is easy? Using quotation marks! It's like walking, provided that walking had two more rules.
*Only use quotation marks when,
1. quoting someone besides yourself
2. denoting sarcasm
3. writing dialogue
When my brother sent me this image, I was left wondering which of the three rules applied.
1. Forget the backwards quotation
marks. Generally, if you're going to quote
someone, the done thing is to tag the person whom you're quoting, otherwise you might as
well have made it up, which defeats the purpose of having quotation marks. Fortunately no one patented the words, 'Thank
you'.
2. If sarcasm was the intention, then
the staff member who wrote this sign wasn't wanting to thank me, but to insult
me. Yet, as Harvey Norman is a store that tries to sell me things rather than
ruin my self esteem, I decided that blurting sarcastic courtesies to potential
buyers was counter-productive.
3. Pretty lame dialogue.
The inevitable conclusion was, of
course, that the writer either had no idea how to use quotation marks properly, or he/she had no idea how to underline text.
Do not use quotation marks when:
1. You aren't doing anything in the
above list. Or, in other words, whenever you're trying to place emphasis on a
given word or phrase.
Surrounding a phrase in quote marks
in order to denote emphasis is just as helpful as surrounding it in commas, or
@ symbols, or these things: ~ , which is to say that they do nothing. Except they don't do nothing. For people who know better, the phrase becomes sarcastic.
If you want to add emphasis to a
phrase, underline it, use italics,
or write it in bold. You could even
try using CAPS, though that generally denotes yelling. The only
punctuation mark that adds any form of emphasis is the exclamation point!
The writer of the sign didn't
know that, and he/she is one of millions. Sad, isn't it? Who would put ~ thingies
around the words 'thank you' to denote emphasis? I sure wouldn't. It's sort of
a rule of life for me. Rule #1: Don't walk on my face. Rule #2: Don’t emphasise
words with ~ thingies.
------------
Here they are again.
Only use quotation marks when,
1. quoting someone besides yourself
2. denoting sarcasm
3. writing dialogue
*There are some other, rare instances in which quotation marks can be used, but even then they aren't necessary.
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