Everyone knows that the world’s material resources — food, water, oil — are distributed unequally, but few realize that the same is true for punctuation. Take quotation marks: Some forms of writing, ...

Quotation marks have a hierarchy, grammar expert June Casagrande notes, and she advises how to put single quotes in their place.

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...