Quotation marks are my favorite punctuation. It means I can break from owning what I write. It means I’m just repeating someone else’s words without the hulking mess of my own thoughts.
But writers should never lead with a quote, one of my editors warned. Rarely are quotes beefy enough to prime a whole story. He said it’s a wimpy ploy.
So maybe my favorite is the apostrophe, the punctuation of ownership. Lora’s Subaru. Lora’s polka dot Dansko sneakers. Owning things is so much easier than owning words.