Semiquotes: CWA Blogging Technical Footnote

I felt a little guilty about the condensed remarks from last year's Michael Laine post: while it appears to be a transcript, it isn't. And after the posting was picked up, it was presented as a transcript on sites out of my control. The reality is that I can't type fast enough to liveblog, nor do I know shorthand (though it is on my list of things to learn) so I take notes longhand in a legal pad. Consequentially, I miss words - I know I'm not getting everything exactly correct. I'm confident I'm presenting an accurate summary of a speaker's remarks, but the editor in me screams that whatever is in quotation marks out to be sacrosanct.

Therefore, I've invented semiquotation marks. They're really two apostrophes together ''like this''. Look closely, there's an extra pixel of space in there. They're meant to convey that whatever is within them is not a direct quotation, but probably close enough so that the speaker would say "yeah, I said that".

Punctuation fans, please note that the semiquotation marks (or gist marks, depending on which sounds cooler) fall at the beginning of the quotation order of operations. Thus: Mr Jones stated, ''I'm reminded by something Lorem Ipsum said: "The first line in Citizen Kane is 'Rosebud'."'' Sure, it tends to look like ASCII art sometimes, but at least one knows when a quote is not held up to be accurate.

To sum up: semiquotes are pretty accurate, normal quotation marks are spot on and the nested single quotes are the concern of the person being quoted. I have to draw a line somewhere.