58c Using quotation marks to signal irony and invented words

58cUsing quotation marks to signal irony and invented words

To show readers that you are using a word or phrase ironically, or that you invented it, enclose it in quotation marks.

The banquet consisted mainly of dried-out chicken and canned vegetables.

The quotation marks suggest that the meal was anything but a banquet.

Your whole first paragraph or first page may have to be guillotined in any case after your piece is finished: it is a kind of forebirth.

—JACQUES BARZUN, “A Writer’s Discipline”

The writer made up the term forebirth.