When to Use Closing Quotes?

Question

I have noticed that BBC will frequently not use closing quotes when quoting long paragraphs of text, as an example it occurs twice in this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30816255 Here: > "One application we are working on is indoor navigation which means we > have sensors within the shoe that measure the acceleration of the > foot, the angular velocity - whether you're turning the foot or not - > and the magnetic field. and here: > "Generated power scales with size, but if you want to be able to > reasonably integrate such a device within a shoe sole, you have to > work with strict constraints, like a small height and limited length > of the device. Is this correct? This is not just an editor's oversight, they do it frequently. Why do they omit the closing quote, is it because the end of the paragraph implies the end of the quote?

Answer 1

The quotes in your example are actually all one quote that has been broken up into paragraphs. If you break a quote into separate paragraphs, you don't put an end quote until you actually come to the end of the quote, but you do put an opening quote at the beginning of each paragraph to indicate that the new paragraph is still part of the quote. This also happens a lot in books with longer dialogues.