Quotation in Headlines
Headline conventions for quoted material: single marks, no full stops, and strict fidelity.
Most newspaper style guides set quotations in headlines with single quotation marks rather than double, purely to save horizontal space and reduce visual clutter at large type sizes.
Headline quotations carry unusual risk. Space forces compression, and compression tempts editors to trim qualifiers — the words that most often carry the speaker's actual meaning. A headline quotation must remain a fair representation of the full statement even after cutting.
Partial quotation is the standard safeguard: quote only the exact phrase and paraphrase the rest, so no invented wording sits inside the marks.
Common mistake: quotation marks used for scepticism in a news headline. Readers cannot reliably distinguish a real quotation from a sneer at headline length, and the ambiguity is routinely read as a factual claim about what someone said.
“Minister: policy 'will not be reversed'”
Keep reading the glossary
Quotation marks used to flag a word as suspect, ironic, or not the writer's own.
Cutting a short audio or video excerpt to circulate as a standalone quotation.
A national style difference — double in American English, single in much of British English.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.