People are very quotable. I personally enjoy quoting myriad books, movies, and random videos from the Internet. But when you need to note that you’re quoting something or someone, there are little punctuation marks that you can use.

The humble quotation mark was first used in the mid-1500’s with the advent of the printing press. They first came into popular use during the 1700’s, when they symbolized pithy remarks, a function that they have retained to this day in the form of ‘airquotes’.

But how do you use a quotation mark? This one isn’t as complicated as the comma or the apostrophe. Simply put, put quotation marks around anything that you want to say exactly as they said it. While that sounds confusing, it’s fairly simple. Let’s say Ann and Bob are having a conversation. Let’s say Bob proclaims his love for live oysters Later that day, Ann is writing an e-mail to Carly and Ann wants to tell her what Bob said. If Ann directly quotes Bob, she needs quotation marks, like so: Bob said, “I love live oysters.” However, if Ann can’t remember what exactly Bob said, she can paraphrase him. If you paraphrase, you cannot use quotation marks. For example: Did you hear about Bob’s love of live oysters?

There are more rules for quotation marks (aren’t there always?). One common use is to note that the word being used in the context of the sentence is non-standard. This applies for puns, slang, or any use of a word that is not completely correct. Another rule is that the titles of short stories need to be in quotation marks, as do the titles of book chapters.

That’s most of the rules that you should ever need for the quotation mark. What’s our advice? Have someone else read it over to see if you’ve done it right. We do proofread all of our signs, but you have the final say. If there’s ambiguity, we defer to you.

Abandon all hope of proper grammar as well

Pop quiz: Most books, blog posts, and articles start with what?

If you guessed “a capital letter”, you are very literal and correct for the purposes of this blog post.

Capitalization is one of the most obvious mistakes that you can make on a sign. It’s not as bad online because it’s a quick fix, but on a sign, it’s permanent. Here’s a quick reminder (or primer) on how to use capitalization.

• The first person pronoun “I” is always capitalized. Always. There are no exceptions.
• Capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
• Names and places are capitalized (e.g. Hunter and Lake Mills). However, directions are not capitalized unless they are a part of the name (e.g. South Beach versus northern Wisconsin).
• Proper nouns are capitalized. A proper noun refers to a specific person, place, or thing.
• In the titles of works, capitalize all important words. (e.g. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus)
• Capitalize a person’s title if it comes before the name (e.g. Senator Silly Sally). However, if the title comes after the name, don’t capitalize it (e.g. Would Silly Sally, the senator, please rise?).

Our advice? Get a second opinion and always remember that you can ignore these rules for style purposes. Many poets do, including e. e. cummings. But be careful with ignoring them if you’re trying to make a formal sign. On the other hand, if you choose the right font, you won’t have to worry about any of this. Some of our fonts only have one case and other fonts have the same size letters, meaning the only difference is the letter design. Check out our old blog posts A Rainbow of Fonts and Do Fonts Talk? for more information.

Remember, capitalization keeps your sign professional. Be careful and double-check what you want.

It's fundamental

Reading is a wonderful thing, especially if you read the entire post.

The short acronym tl;dr has become part of the internet lexicon, but it signals a significant problem. Tl;dr, which stands for “too long; didn’t read” shows the lack of care that people have for reading. This problem is especially dangerous in web commerce. One of the things that we hear is “How can we hang our signs?” And without fail, we have a link to the installation page on the item description. (You can check for yourself here.)

I realize that this isn’t the best forum for getting the message out (really, posting an article about people not reading on a blog, something that people who don’t read… won’t read), but it’s one of my pet peeves. If you have a good question about something and you can’t find the answer, then ask away. We might have overlooked something. But spend five minutes looking before asking us directly. We like your calls, but we don’t like wasting your time by forcing you to wait while we look something up.

As my kindergarten teacher said, “Ask three before me.” Look at three pages before calling or e-mailing us and you’ll find the answers to 90% of your sign questions.