In English, it is standard to use backticks (`) and single quotes (') to form a pair of quotes...

The standard English typographic convention for quotation marks is not to use backticks (`) and single quotes (') as a pair. Instead, the established practice employs distinct opening and closing characters for both double and single quotation marks. For double quotes, the correct characters are the opening quotation mark (“) and the closing quotation mark (”). For single quotes, which are typically used for a quote within a quote or for specific stylistic purposes like highlighting a term, the correct pair is the opening single quotation mark (‘) and the closing single quotation mark (’). The use of the vertical backtick is almost exclusively reserved for technical contexts, such as denoting code or file paths in computing, and it does not function as a standard opening quotation mark in prose.

The confusion likely arises from the limitations of basic typewriters and early digital character sets, which lacked distinct opening and closing glyphs. In those systems, the neutral vertical apostrophe (') and, on some keyboards, the backtick (`) were repurposed as stand-ins. This led to the common but typographically incorrect practice of using a backtick as an opening single quote and a straight apostrophe as the closing single quote. While this "grave accent and apostrophe" pairing became a de facto standard in plain-text environments and certain programming languages for delimiting strings, it remains a workaround rather than a formal rule of English punctuation. In professional typesetting, publishing, and formal writing, the curved or "smart" quotes are the required forms.

Adhering to the correct typographic convention is a key marker of editorial precision. The visual distinction between opening and closing marks aids readability by immediately signaling the start and end of quoted material. The persistence of the backtick-apostrophe model is largely confined to contexts where character encoding is constrained or where it carries a specific technical meaning. For instance, in markdown or code documentation, backticks have a defined semantic purpose entirely separate from quotation. Therefore, while one may encounter the `'` combination in informal digital communication or legacy text, it should not be considered standard for English quotation. The proper mechanism involves using the dedicated curly quotation characters, which are now universally supported in modern word processors and text editors through automatic substitution features.

References

Related Questions