This piece by Colleen Flaherty is in two parts. The opening part describes an article that appeared in Slate, "by Andrew Heisel, a New Haven, Conn.-based writer and occasional part-time English professor" (see "Single Quotes or Double Quotes? It's Really Quite Simple." -- http://slate.me/1uP1VDG).

<quote>

Writing Professors Respond

Christopher Thaiss, the Clark Kerr Presidential Chair and Professor in writing at the University of California at Davis, said there’s been no surge in single quotation use among his students. (Although he said most of them do practice – probably unconsciously – the British style of putting their additional punctuation outside of quotation marks, which he called more “logical.”) But then again, he added “I'm not a stickler for either double or single quotes.”

“Frankly,” Thaiss said, “I'm much more concerned about whether students use quote marks at all when they cite passages from other writers,” to avoid unintentional plagiarism.

Dan Melzer, reading and writing coordinator at California State University at Sacramento and author of the recent Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing, was equally unfamiliar but descriptivist.

“I haven't seen this trend in my students' writing,” he said. But where it is happening, "I don't think it's anything to be alarmed about.”

</quote>