A few weeks ago I messaged my mom about quotations. She left quotes unannotated in her writing, which I found a little jarring at times. What about italics? I suggested.

There's something romantic about dialog without quotation marks. It feels breezy, like it was just thrown together. Writers like Comac McCarthy and Sally Rooney use this style to great effect — creating a fluid feeling, where the inner world of the narrator and the outer world of the action blur together and emotions flow through everything.

Around the same time, my coworker Alex Trost shared a link to an amazing resource on web accessibility guildeines. The guidelines say that you should avoid italics, because they're harder to parse for some readers. Reading through the guidelines, I realized that the same would be true for unmarked plaintext quotations: for some readers, they're just confusing.

I realized that there should always be a reason for a choice. These stylistic choices have a cost. So, it's worth asking: is it worth the cost and, if so, why? That question helps clarify my thinking. I might abandon quotation marks if I want to be poetic, or use italics if I really want a line of speech to flow with the text. But, in general, it makes me appreciate the workhorse that is the reliable ol' quotation mark at the start of a new line.