Question on academic writing

[Garren Jacobsen]

I have searched all over for what this (») means in academic writing and I can't find diddly dooda. Can any of y'all get me to help. It is generally surrounding block quotes. To give a bit of background I am reviewing a law journal entry from a foreign professor and I see it popping up and have no idea if it is a fomatting thing, because I have sometimes seen word auto correct quotation marks into (»).

 

[Butterfly]

It could be the autoformat.

I've never seen it, but I think it more likely that it's a style thing and they are being used as parentheses (or brackets) to draw attention to the fact that what you are reading is a >>quote<< from another source. Kind of a way to distinguish the author's work from the quoted text.

(Edit: i just found something when looking at typography symbols ... Chinese punctuation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Could be Chinese Title Marks. Or Japanese Brackets / Quotation marks Japanese typographic symbols - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

 

[Pythagoras]

I don't know about academic writing, but in a lot of German novels, those are often in place of quotation marks. Seems like some sort of foreign convention on quotations.

 

[skip.knox]

Well, it's only foreign if you aren't German. Or French, it's used there as well.

The symbol » has nothing in particular to do with academic writing. Can you tell us where you saw it? My guess it comes from a non-English publisher.

 

[Garren Jacobsen]

I'm on a law journal and was editing a foreign professor's paper. I was just curious about its meaning.