I was told the other day that when writing a report, the first occurrence of a word should be in quotes and all further occurrences should not. When I asked whether there was a rule to which words should be in quotes, he could not give definite criteria. I have since looked through some of his work and found that he puts an awful lot of nouns in quotation marks following the above rule. And it is not like he ever defines them in the text, they are just in quotes the first time that they appear.
My question is: is the above an actual rule for proper grammar? If it is not, is there a similar one that he might have got mixed up with? Or is it simply not a rule and just something he made up? I certainly hadn't heard about a rule like it before talking to him.
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