Some Worrying Quotation Marks in Our Moving Estimate
March 26th, 2007, 10 Comments »
Next month we’re moving, and so I’m obtaining some estimates from (hopefully) reputable movers. One guy was very professional, and wrote up a very thorough free estimate (including references!). There was one thing that concerned me:
Does this mean our couch, TV and PVR will be ’stored’ in his den?
This is a fairly common mistake in punctuation (and, I know, I shouldn’t throw stones from my glass house). How do people learn to make this error? They seem to be conflating emphasis markers like exclamation marks with quotation marks.