Highlighting and Defining Your Terms

Business writers sometimes need to define specific words — especially when an everyday word refers to our products or services. (E.g., “The word tweet refers to a single Twitter post.”)

The following newspaper sentence is about small businesses; it uses quotation marks to highlight a word the writer is defining:

Even if you define “small” as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Without the quotes, readers could feel confused:

Even if you define small as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Italics also give a heads-up that a writer is exploring what a term means:

Even if you define small as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Since some Web programs can’t set text in italics, most online journalists still use quotation marks to highlight these defined terms. For a more polished look, we recommend italics rather than quotes when you type a word that you then define. 

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammarincludes a chapter on commonly confused words and two chapters on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.