You can use
HTML codes to print special characters. the ones you're looking for are < and > (less than and greater than) - but really all you need to do is type "<random tag>" because the greater than sign.
another useful one is & -- which gives you the ampersand "&" :-)
As for ' vs " i'll get into that another time.
By the way one super extra fun side effect of editing a post that has HTML codes in them -- they get converted to the character they represent once you go to the "edit shout" section so you'll have to change them back to the "&something;" form every time you edit the post.