Sarah Palin quotation marks

Hello Sarah. Please have a seat.

We know you are planning to write a book. So we wanted to offer some free grammar lesson from The Grammar Doctor.

Today a punctuation lesson, specifically, quotation marks.

Quotations marks generally are used to indicate material that is spoken or written by someone else. They can also be used to specify titles of things such as poems, stories or articles. There are other rules that apply Sarah.

Today we are going to concentrate on using quotation marks to indicate exactly what is spoken or written by someone else.

Let's use an example. Oh here's something you recently wrote on Twitter.

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Now in this example Sarah, we noticed you used quotation marks on the phrases, "death panel" and "level of productivity in society."

This would mean that either someone spoke or wrote those words or they appeared in a document.

You used quotation marks, but you failed to tell us, who spoke or wrote those words or from what document they came from.

If this was an indirect quote, you probably remember from your writing or journalism classes at Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, Matanuska-Susitna College or the University of Idaho that indirect quotes do not require quotation marks.

Thank you Sarah. See ya next week.