punctuation - Should a phrase which is the subject of a sentence or paragraph be quoted?

From the Grammarist website:

In a manner of speaking is an idiom that means the same as ‘in other words’ or ‘so to speak’.

They've bolded the phrase which is the subject of discussion, but have quoted the two other phrases used for explanation. This seems inconsistent to me.

Are there rules or best practices regarding the use of quotes (or other punctuation?) to refer to phrases in this way? Would "in a manner of speaking" be better quoted, or marked up some other way, in their explanation?

Answer

Among the key formatting questions that face anyone putting together a collection of discussions of separate words or phrases are the issues of how to handle the entry name itself at first occurrence, the equivalent meaning of the word or phrase, subsequent occurrences of the entry name, and related terms that have their own separate entries elsewhere in the work.

It seems to me that The Grammarist does a nice job of dealing with these various formatting questions. For purposes of reviewing the site's decisions, I reproduce the head and first two paragraphs of its entry for "in a manner of speaking" here:

In a manner of speaking

In a manner of speaking is an idiom that means the same as ‘in other words’ or ‘so to speak’. It is used usually after a statement to clarify a subtext or alternative meaning to the previous statement. Many people confuse this phrase by saying in a matter of speaking. This phrase builds off of one of manner‘s definitions as a type or kind of something (e.g., manner of men, manner of style). So one can think of manner of speaking as a way of saying something.

The related idiom is as a matter of fact. This phrase means ‘actually’ or ‘contrary to what has been said’. Typically it is used when one wants to correct misinformation or to give further information on a particular point.

The person who made the style decisions for this page of The Grammarist chose to bold the page head, the first occurrence of the entry name in the body of the discussion, and the first occurrence of other terms that have separate entries on other pages of the Website (in this excerpt, "as a matter of fact"). The person also decided to put the meaning equivalents of the entry name (here, ‘in other words’ and ‘so to speak’) in single quotation marks, as is commonly done in British English books (U.S. English books tend to use double quotation marks for this purpose). And finally, the person at The Grammarist chose to italicize the entry name on subsequent occurrences in the body copy, and to italicize other words when they require special emphasis (as with matter here) or are being used to refer to a word rather than to the thing that the word normally represents (as with manner's).

All of this is very neatly done. In fact, the only formatting mistake I see in the excerpted content is the open single quotation mark that appears in place of a hyphen in the possessive word manner's—and that most likely occurred because the author marked manner for italic and then followed with an apostrophe that the online word processor read incorrectly as a quotation mark owing to its following an HTML code character for italics.

A fairly recent book that adopts somewhat similar formatting conventions is John Ayto, The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, third edition (2009). Here is a sample entry from that book:

knight

a knight in shining armour an idealized heroic person, especially a man who comes to the rescue of a woman in distress or in a difficult situation.

This expression, a variant of which is a knight on a white charger, is often used ironically of someone who presents himself in this guise but is in fact inadequate to the role. Compare with a white knight (at WHITE).

Ayto lists the first occurrence of the entry name in bold, although it appears beneath a more general category name that includes multiple entries. Ayto lists variant wordings in italics but related terms that have their own separate entries elsewhere in the book in bold. Unlike The Grammarist, Ayto does not put the definition of the phrase under discussion in quotation marks, but this may reflect Ayto's decision to provide a full definition of the phrase rather than just a phrase equivalent.

Both reference works handle their formatting tasks clearly and consistently, which should satisfy most readers.