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Language point

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Why you can trust SCMP

Noting the wide range of ingredients that immigrant cultures have brought to the United States, Mr Scheib said: 'Now people really love the idea of experimenting.

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'American food is like American culture. People [are] from all over the world. There is no one American cuisine. It is all like jazz,' he said.

Note the sentence Now people really love the idea of experimenting. It contains an open quotation mark but not a closed quotation mark.

The reason is that if a quote runs on for more than one paragraph, you put the open quotation mark at the beginning of each paragraph, and you put the closed quotation mark only at the end of the last paragraph. In other words, the first paragraphs of a quote should contain only the open quotation mark but not the closed quotation mark, whereas the last paragraph contains both the open and closed quotation marks. Note that this applies only if the paragraphs are quotes from the same source.

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