Spoiler alert: in this post I will explain why I am changing the way I write blockquotes.
I fully expect 99% of readers will file this into the “why on Earth are you sharing this information with us, literally no one cares” category, and rightfully so. (If you consider yourself in that 99% and would rather leave right now, might I offer this cute video of 5-year-old kids making espresso instead?)
This one goes out to the other one percent—the writers who obsess over stylistic details and think way too much about this stuff. I love you wackos, you know who you are.
I should mention right off the bat that I write in Markdown. Thus, blockquotes are written like this:
>I wish I'd come up with something more clever to put here.
which outputs:
I wish I'd come up with something more clever to put here.
Simple, right? Just put an angle bracket at the beginning of each paragraph, and boom you're done. Until now though, I've been stylizing my quotes like so:
>_“This is even less clever. I don't deserve to be called a writer.”_
which outputs:
“This is even less clever. I don't deserve to be called a writer.”
In case you don't see the difference, I added underscores and smart quotes at both ends of the passage. In Markdown, the underscores italicize the text. And the smart quotes...well, they're just classier than regular quotes, okay?
My reasons for styling blockquotes this way were twofold:
- I fancied the idea of visually distinguishing blockquotes from their surrounding text.
- Theoretically I could force quotes to display the same no matter what site I published them to, assuming there were no CSS overrides in place.
For the most part this system worked okay. But things got hairy the second I tried quoting something with its own styles in place.
For example, since all my blockquotes had been italicized by default, treating text that is already italicized presents a conundrum. After some thinking I eventually decided to italicize quotes in the inverse form, so to speak.
It's easier if I show you what I mean rather than explaining at length. Here's a quote from a recent Brain Pickings piece (fourth graf from the bottom):
The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
Notice that I've kept Ms. Popova's styling choices intact:
>The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he [observed](http://literaryjukebox.brainpickings.org/post/110505527852): _“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”_
When styling blockquotes locally, I would have done it this way:
“The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.””
It looks like this in my document:
>_“The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he [observed](http://literaryjukebox.brainpickings.org/post/110505527852):_ “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.””
To dilineate the William James quote from Maria's, and still maintain my baseline italicized quoting style, I unitalicized the William James quote, thereby essentially inverting Popova's styles. Also notice that the fact his quote ends the blockquote results in dual smart quotes. Awkward.
I've run into this sort of thing many times over the years, and yet I've stubbornly clung to my blockquoting ways, inverting italicized text all over the place and always wondering what to do with double-quotes. (Do I remove all of my quotes to avoid clutter? Change the quotee's smart quotes to dumb ones and keep mine smart? Give up, delete the document altogether, and down a bottle of wine? The possibilities are endless, folks.)
I even had a TextExpander snippet that took a passage of copied text and surrounded it with the basic italicization/quote cruft, which I would then style as needed. And I haven't even mentioned multi-paragraph passages yet.
When using my snippet on multiple paragraphs, I not only needed to add additional > brackets on every line after the first—which I see no way of avoiding, unless someone like Federico Viticci or David Sparks has TextExpander secrets they'd like to share—I had to go through and manually italicize every paragraph within the blockquote (including the first and last ones, since the underscores were only added to the very beginning and end of the passage), then invert italics where needed and continue pondering the dual quote thing.
Needless to say this has been a huge pain. So, screw it. I'm finally throwing in the towel and reverting back to the most basic form of blockquoting:
>A simple angle bracket next to the quoted passage.
If the passage I'm quoting is italicized, I will add that styling to my blockquote as needed. Otherwise, the text will appear as normal. This will also prevent any potential quote clutter, smart or dumb.
So. This was definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Sunday night. One thousand words about blockquotes. I need some sleep.
