How are "yes" and "no" formatted in sentences?

Question

If I am expecting an answer from a question and wish to state my prediction, do I need to use quotes around a simple "yes" or "no"?

I think the answer is no. / I think the answer is "no."

That would be a yes. / That would be a "yes."

Potential end cases:

Why would he say, "No"?

The votes are in; three yeses and four nos.

The options are yes or no; not "maybe."

Answer 1

Unless there's a style guide telling you otherwise, I'd suggest basing your decision on whether you mean the literal words 'yes' and 'no', or the general nature of the response. Consider:

Why would he say, "No"? (For that is the word that he said.)

vs

Why would he say no? (What he actually said was "Over my dead body", but let's not worry about that detail.)

Answer 2

In both the answer is no and say no, quotes are relatively uncommon. The Corpus of Contemporary American English gives these results:

the answer is no        484 hits
the answer is " no       27 hits (including punctuation variants)

[say] no               8891 hits
[say] " no "            521 hits (including punctuation variants)

However there are only 10 yesses and 30 yeses, so you might want to reword that one (perhaps The votes are in: 3 in favor and 4 against).

My subjective impression is that it is better style to omit the quotes. Your style, of course, is up to you.

Answer 3

Personal opinion? Put the quotes. This is what they’re there for: to distinguish between the meaning of the word, and the word itself (“ceci n’est pas une pipe”).

For comparison, consider

The answer is affirmative.

Here, “affirmative” is a word that signifies that the answer is positive / “yes”. But the word “yes” itself is not synonymous with “affirmative” in this usage. I may affirm an answer by saying “yes”. But I cannot yes an answer to affirm it.

But unfortunately popular writing usually seems to oppose my conviction. That is, in most novels such short expressions are rarely put between quotes even though they are a fragment of direct speech.

Answer 4

A handbook of style will tell you that the simpler, cleaner format is usually better, and is becoming more universally accepted.

My instinct would be that you would only want to use quotes if you want to make it explicitly clear that you are quoting an exact, phonetic utterance. Notice the two elements of the criterion:

1. You are quoting a phonetic utterance.
2. You want to make it very clear that you are.

Otherwise, just say no to quotes.

Answer 5

• "Answer was 'no'." — correct; gives clean sense.
• "Answer was no." — incorrect; meaning unclear.

Answer 6

To quote from Grammar Girl (emphasis added),

• "If you are directly quoting someone, put the word in quotation marks."
• "If you are indirectly quoting someone, don't put the word in quotation marks."

Here are some examples:

• The cat smiled and said, "Yes."
• "No," I replied, "he is unavailable."
• I hoped the answer would be yes, she could go.
• In so many words, I had to tell him no.

In the last two examples, the words "yes" and "no" summarize the nature of the response, but do not necessarily reflect any spoken words.