Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
My personal preference would be to also use quotation marks. It is, after all, quoted text. I.e. The door was marked "Do Not Enter".
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My reading of
New Hart's Rules (The Oxford Style Guide) is that they would agree with you. As far as I can tell it has no explicit rule for "short signs in running text", and so the situation would fall back to the base guide about quotations and direct speech ("A direct quotation presents the exact words spoken on a particular occasion or written in a particular place."), although being the Oxford style, that would be 'Do Not Enter' (single-quotation marks). Edit: Being a direct quotation you would not alter the case, however a "Do Not Enter" sign is typically written as such (and so the CMOS may appear to have been applied in many cases where it has not).
However, my experience in fiction is that there is a lot of variation, hence my original post.