Quick Answer
No, you should not use quotation marks for emphasis. Every major style guide (Chicago, AP, MLA, APA) treats emphasis quotes as an error. To readers they signal scare quotes, irony or doubt, which is almost the opposite of what you wanted to say. Use bold, italics, capital letters, layout or stronger wording instead.
The classic example is a sign that reads Fresh "Bread" Sold Here. Almost everyone reads that as "this is not actually bread." The same effect happens online, on menus and in marketing copy.
Why Emphasis Quotes Backfire
Quotation marks have specific jobs: marking off direct speech, citing a source, signalling a title of a short work, or flagging a term used in a non-standard way. That last job is the problem. When readers see Our "fresh" produce on a sign, they apply the non-standard-use reading by default, which is almost always negative. The marks raise an eyebrow you did not intend.
Linguists call this the scare quote effect. It is so consistent that there is a popular blog ("Unnecessary Quotation Marks") devoted entirely to mocking it. If you mean strong emphasis, your reader is the wrong place to gamble on intent.
What to Use Instead
- Italics for moderate emphasis on a single word or short phrase, especially in formal writing. Chicago and MLA both recommend this.
- Bold for stronger emphasis or to help readers scan a list or instruction. Cleaner than italics on web copy.
- Capitalisation sparingly, for product names or trademarks where it is required.
- Layout rather than typography: pull quotes, headings, callouts, white space. A well placed line break does more than four words in italics.
- Rewrite the sentence. The most ignored option. If a word needs emphasis to land, you can often restructure the sentence so the emphasis is built in.
When Quotation Marks Are Correct
Quotation marks belong in four specific places.
- Direct speech or written quotes: She said, "We are leaving."
- Titles of short works like articles, songs, short stories, episodes and chapters. Long works (books, films, albums) take italics.
- Words used as words when discussing the term itself, although italics are now more common: The word "their" is often confused with "there."
- Scare quotes or irony, used sparingly to flag a term you do not actually endorse. This is the use that gets confused with emphasis.
The Sign-Painter Test
Before you wrap a word in quotation marks, imagine it on a hand painted sign outside a shop. Does it read like you stand behind the word, or like you are smirking at it? If it could go either way, the marks are wrong for emphasis. Use a different tool.
Bottom Line
Skip quotation marks for emphasis. Use italics, bold, capitalisation, layout or a tighter sentence. Quotation marks have a tone that readers cannot ignore, and that tone is rarely the one you want when you are trying to draw attention to a word.
More context worth knowing
To round out the answer, here is some additional background on using quotation marks to emphasize a word. Style guides treat this rule as more than a cosmetic choice. It signals to readers that the writer respects the original source, follows a consistent convention, and understands the difference between American and British practice. When you write about quotes for emphasis in any professional setting, that consistency is what separates a polished page from a draft that distracts the reader.
Editors at major publishers, including university presses, trade magazines, and legal journals, run every manuscript through a style check that flags exactly this kind of issue. If the guidance feels picky, remember that search engines and screen readers also rely on consistent punctuation to parse a sentence correctly. A misplaced quotation mark can change how an excerpt is rendered in a featured snippet, an email preview, or an accessibility tool.
Practical tip: keep a one-page cheat sheet next to your keyboard with the three rules you reach for most often. For quotes for emphasis, that usually means the rule about capitalization, the rule about punctuation placement, and the rule about block quotations. Anything more than three rules tends to be forgotten under deadline pressure, so curate ruthlessly.
If you write for a global audience, double check whether your house style follows American English or British English. The two traditions disagree on punctuation placement around quotation marks, on the choice between single and double marks for the outer quotation, and on whether long quotations should be indented or set off with a colon. Picking one tradition and sticking to it across a whole site is more important than picking the "correct" one, because mixed styles confuse readers and weaken trust.
Finally, if you are publishing online, remember that screen readers announce quotation marks differently depending on the user's settings. Curly smart quotes, straight typewriter quotes, and the special primes used for measurements are not interchangeable. Use the correct character for the job so that assistive tech reads your sentence the way you intended, and so that copy-paste into another document preserves your meaning.
