Missing—Quotation Marks, Reward if Found

Every year in the spring, coyotes come down from the nearby mountains and cats in my neighborhood begin to disappear.

Recently I’ve noticed that quotations marks in American literature are suffering a similar fate. The situation is getting so bad I’m considering putting up missing posters on telephone poles and at the library.

Miranda July doesn’t use quotation marks. Cormack McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. And Robert Coover didn’t use ’em in his story “White Bread Jesus” in last month’s Harper’s.

I fear soon nobody will use them; that quotation marks (also know as “quotes” or “double quotes”) will go the way of the trema (the two dots used above a vowel to indicate an extra syllable, as in “coöperate”) and the en-dash (once used to indicate equality among words used to form a compound adjective, as in “the Franco–Prussian war”).

I can live without tremas and en-dashes, but I can’t bear the thought of the typographic menagerie lacking quotation marks.

Sure, I get it: a page free of quotation marks is easy on the eye. Without any of those distracting, dimple-like quotes grinning out at you everywhere, the page looks and feels uncluttered.

And I can’t help but admire a writer who is so totally confident in his characters’ voices that, with help only from line breaks, periods, and the occasional speech tag, he feels his readers will be able to easily distinguish dialogue from exposition—even when the dialogue appears mid-paragraph.

But despite these things, I think the stylistic decision not to use quotations marks is risky—particularly if you’re dealing with lazy readers like me. In Coover’s piece (you can read the first paragraph here), it wasn’t until after I’d read a few paragraphs that I was able to understand what was going on in the first paragraph, at which point I had to go back and reread it to really appreciate the story.

While it could be argued that this was a deliberate decision on Coover’s part—the protagonist is having a mental and spiritual breakdown and the style reflects his confusion—it didn’t work for me.

If Coover had just sprinkled his text with a few extra little pieces of punctuation, then the characters immediately would have become more clear and the writing more enjoyable.

William Zinsser, the guru of style, has a lot of great things to say about writing. One of them is, “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”

Quotation marks—as easy-to-follow indicators of speech—achieve all of these things. I hate to think they might get devoured.