“When quotation marks are misused, it changes the meaning of the sentence,” Alex Wong, the marketing expert, book author and creator of “Hijack Copywriter” told Bored Panda in an interview. According to Wong, a misused quotation mark, comma or apostrophe can make a huge difference.
“This can sometimes cause funny unintended results. For example, each of these three sentences have a different meaning:
'She' was filled with excitement.
She was 'filled' with excitement.
She was filled with 'excitement.'”
Wong believes that people fail to pay attention to where they place their quotation marks. “Compared to periods and commas, quotations get much less focus. You’re more likely to use a comma or period in a sentence than a quote.”
“The most common use of quotation marks is for dialogue, such as when someone is speaking. For example, Fred said, ‘The weather is lovely today,’” Wong explained. He said that quotations are also commonly used when you are including a quote in a blog post or essay.
“The researcher states: ‘5 in 10 Americans will get into a car accident sometime.’” He added that he made up this statement.
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The marketing expert and professional writer also shared a couple of the most common writing mistakes that people make. The first most common mistake is “confusing similar words that sound the same but have different meanings. Here are some common mistakes: Your/you’re; Its/it’s; There/their/they're; Whether/weather; To/too/two; By/buy/bye.”
Many people also tend to confuse similar-sounding words with different meanings, Wong argues. For example: “Affects/effects; Further/farther; chews/choose; addition/edition.”The third common mistake Wong notes is using sentence fragments or incomplete sentences. For example, Correct: “I stayed home from work because I had a fever.” Incorrect: “I stayed home from work. Because I had a fever.”
Previously, Bored Panda spoke with Searchlights, one of the moderators for the '"Suspiciously" Used Quotation Marks' online community. According to moderator, "I tend to think it's related to the challenge of finding nuance and tone in text. People want to emphasize a word, and for whatever reason they think putting it in quotations gets them there."
"Generally, the use of quotation marks (when they're not an actual quotation) carries a connotation of sarcasm, or of a tongue-in-cheek admission that the thing in quotes isn't actually what it's said to be. That's what has the effect of making the statement suspicious," they explained.
"My favorite examples usually come from the food service industry. There's something alarming about chicken being written dubiously as "chicken" (what is it, really?)," they said.
