Dear CBS Executives,
Your new show “Moonlight” sounds interesting:
“An ‘undead’ private investigator helps the living, instead of feeding on them, by using his acute vampire senses”
I loved this the first time I saw it. When it was called “Angel.”
-Me
PS: TV Guide, why is “undead” in single quotations?
Single quotes are used to quote something inside of a quotation using double quotes.
However, the use of single quotes is highly frowned upon style-wise. It’s considered lazy writing.
So, the single quotes made sense in my usage, but their usage had no surrounding double quotes.
Also, we saw single quotes used in a headline in a Pittsburgh paper. sigh
Well there is nothing in the Chicago Manual of Style that dictates that this is okay and believe me, I dug deep.
The only thing I can offer is to find out which style guide the newspaper uses and look it up. e.g. The New York Times Style guide. Now that I think about it, I suppose that in journalism the single quotation may be the preferred style for the sake of typesetting.
It doesn’t mean that it is right, just that the style is accepted for that particular medium. You would be amazed at some of the approved styles in the Microsoft Manual of Style of Technical Publications. It’s barf-o-rific!
Strunk and White may have some thoughts on this as well but I don’t keep that particular style guide at work.
Nerds.