Quotation marks should be used with care.

In an academic essay, quotation marks should not be used for slang words, colloquial expressions or to add emphasis. If you are using them to show that you don't necessarily agree with the definition - for example: some people take 'traditional society' to mean mother, father and 2.5 children - make sure you don't do this too often. Overuse of quotation marks in a text is as annoying as somebody continuously painting quotation marks in the air when you're having a conversation.

Use of quotation marks in quotations:

There are two types: single (‘ ’) and double (“ ”).

Quotation marks are used primarily to indicate direct quotations, i.e. an exact transplant of somebody else’s words. British English tends to favour the use of single quotation marks to indicate direct quotations. For example: We have been told by Donald Kerr, the principal director of National Intelligence, that 'protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won'.

Always make sure that you have an opening quotation mark and a closing one. If you don’t, the marker will struggle to work out which words are yours and which belong to the quote. Don't change the punctuation in the quotation itself: leave it as the original author intended.

Double quotation marks are used for quotations within quotations. For example: According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 'among the information kept on students were ethnicity, phone number, email addresses and their extra curricular activities, which, as a student declared in their online newspaper, "were really nobody's else's business" '.6