New York Times Corrects Trump for Claiming The Paper ‘Set Up’ Bob Corker

Single Quotes or Double Quotes? It’s Really Quite Simple.
By Andrew Heisel

If you are an American, using quotation marks could hardly be simpler: Use double quotation marks at all times unless quoting something within a quotation, when you use single. It's different in the greater Anglosphere, where they generally use singles in books and doubles in newspapers. It's still pretty simple, but nothing so straightforward as here.

Yet some of us don't seem happy with what we've got. For several years now in teaching writing classes to college freshmen, I’ve noticed some students adopt another rule: double quotes for long quotations, single quotes for single words or short phrases. They'll quote a long passage from Measure for Measure accurately, but when they want to quote one of Shakespeare's words, a cliché, or some dubious concept like "virtue," they'll go with single quotes.

It took me a while to understand what was going on, but after thoroughly studying it I developed a rigorous explanation for this staggering decline in standards: kids today.

But then I looked up from their papers to find this usage in the manuscript of a friend's novel. Then I saw them in another friend's manuscript—this time, of an academic book. Then I turned to the Internet and they were everywhere—in a local news story, in a paper by a college professor, in a blog on social marketing, in a blog on the education system, on the website of the Children's Literacy Foundation. In each case, the same short/single, long/double quote rule was followed.

Sure, he was Trunk Full of Guns. But was he one of them? Was he a psychopath? He didn't think so. He had come as close as a human being could possibly get to abandoning his humanity. But he hadn't. He wasn't, well, evil. And he didn't think that even the most prolific shooters necessarily were, either. He knew them—he knew what they had gone through because of what he had gone through.

The pathway to violence: That wasn't just a term of threat assessment. He didn't know what threat assessment was. But he had been on the pathway and remembered its milestones. And so when he got an e-mail asking if he had any ideas about stopping mass shootings, he volunteered to talk. He didn't just have ideas; he wound up doing a kind of threat assessment on his former self, if only so that people might be able to assess the threat—and yes, the humanity—of people like him.

Trunk does, however, think often of the person who is out there right now feeling the way he used to feel. The person with a grievance. The person with a plan. The person with a gun—hell, an arsenal. The person we feel powerless against, because we don't know who he is. All we know is what he—or she—is going to do.

Can he or she—they—be stopped before they become what we in America call "mass shooters"? We are so convinced they can't be that we don't even know if anyone is trying to stop them. Can they be understood? We are so convinced the evil they represent is inexplicable that we don't try to explicate it. Mass shootings have become by now American rituals—blood sacrifices, propitiations to our angry American gods, made all the more terrible by our apparent acceptance of them. They have become a feature of American life, and we know very well what follows each one: the shock, the horror, the demonization of the guilty, the prayers for the innocent, the calls for action, the finger-pointing, the paralysis, and finally the forgetting. We know that they change everything only so that everything may remain unchanged.

But we are wrong about that. Mass shootings are not unstoppable, and there are people trying to stop them. They are not even inexplicable, because every time Trunk hears of one he understands why it happened and who did it. We have come to believe that mass shooters can't be stopped because we never know who they are until they make themselves known. But Trunk was almost one of them once. He was a heartbeat away. And what he understands is that shooters want to be known, not through the infamy of a massacre, but before they have to go through with it. They want to be known as much as he, years later, wants to remain unknown, walking to the bus stop in the rain.