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Grammar girl here. Who's your friendly guide to the English language? I am. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today, we'll talk about how to use single quotation marks and double quotation marks and why you should have a house style guide.

Most people think of double quotation marks as being for quotations, which they are, but they also have other legitimate uses.

For example, double quotation marks are often used around the title of a short work, such as a magazine article or an episode of a TV show.

The Darmak and Jelard at Tanagra episode of Star Trek Next Generation is one of my favorites.

And if you're writing that out and following a style that says you use quotation marks around the title of a TV show episode,

you'd put quotation marks around Darmak and Jelard at Tanagra.

The rules for longer works, such as books or tricky. The Associated Press uses quotation marks, the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook recommend italics.

People sometimes use double quotation marks to indicate that a word is special in some way.

I bet you've all seen quotation marks used as something called scare quotes, which are quotation marks put around a word,

just so that the writer doesn't buy in to the meaning.

For example, I could write the sentence, women achieved quote equality, unquote, when they were granted the right to vote in 1920.

That would indicate that although women getting the right to vote was heralded as equality at the time,

I don't think it was enough of a gain to merit the word equality.

More often though scare quotes, which are also sometimes called sneer quotes, are used to impart a sense of irony or disdain.

There is especially common in nasty political commentary, as in politicians quote care, unquote, about their constituents.

Double quotation marks can also be used when you're writing a sentence and you want to refer to a word, rather than use its meaning.

Since I talk about words a lot, this comes up in almost every grammar girl episode.

It's a style choice. You can use italics or double quotation marks to highlight words, but we use quotation marks on the grammar girl site.

A common mistake though is to use quotation marks to simply highlight a word in a sentence.

The popular blog of unnecessary quotation marks, rest in peace, did nothing but mock signs that misuse quotation marks in this way.

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