Does the end quotation go before or after the period?
Bradley Burton
mark always goes after the period. However, in college, I'm noticing that's
not always what is happening. Same as when I sometimes read news articles.
For example:
She took her to the party, and she remembered saying, "have fun."
I've seen it as:
She took her to the party and she remembered saying, "have fun".
There are others that I can't think of examples for. I'd ask a prof., but
it's summer so there's no school.
Also is grammar use different in classes like philosophy. I now basically
put commas wherever there's a pause. Any tips for proper comma usage?
Raymond S. Wise
news:NpMGc.35675$MB3.1079@attbi_s04...
The FAQ written for the newsgroup alt.usage.english is a good place to begin
to look for answers to such questions. In this case, the FAQ suggests
consulting different style guides depending upon whether you wish to follow
American English or British English usage. It suggests, at
http://alt-usage-english.org/intro_d.shtml#Quotationmarks
the following:
[quote]
US
Handbook of Style, Merriam-Webster
http://www.mae.ucsd.edu/mw/Mwed00000125.html
http://www.mae.ucsd.edu/mw/Mwed00000126.html
UK
The Guardian Unlimited Style Guide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,5817,184823,00.html
[end quote]
Some Americans, including some computer programmers, are offended by the
American method and imitate the British. I myself--and I've been an amateur
computer programmer--find little advantage to this and prefer following the
traditional American usage.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com
Peter Duncanson
As a British computer programmer I use the British convention.
It seems to be a matter of style and convention rather than logic. I would
consider the British method fractionally more logical than the American.
However, they are both "illogical" because they each omit a period/full-stop
from the end of a sentence.
This would be logical: 'He said "This is a complete sentence.".'.
Three sentences, three sentence capitals, three periods.
--
Peter Duncanson
UK
(posting from a.e.u)
Raymond S. Wise
news:0qkne0d2a4qistb46...@4ax.com...
See Michael Quinion's article in his *World Wide Words* Web page in which he
explains why there is only one apostrophe in "shan't":
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sha3.htm
Peter Duncanson
Quite.
Russ
"Bradley Burton" <bra...@comcast.net> wrote
The whole business of putting the period or comma inside the
quotes is mostly aesthetic, because the when it's placed after
the quote, it looks isolated, instead of snuggled up to the
preceding letter, like it ought to be. An exception is made for
taller punctuation marks, such as colons, semicolons, question
marks and exclamation points, simply because of the shape of the
mark, because they are adjacent to the quote mark, and the visual
effect is less jarring.
Some of the posts have discussed this in terms of "logic," from
the perspective of a programmer. And indeed, some style manuals,
especially those on technical writing, mention that when the
quoted material is describing something you type into a computer,
it's usually necessary, for the sake of clarity, to put
punctuation marks outside the quotes. For example:
To display the directory, type "DIR".
The period is outside the quote, because it's not part of the
command. Or this one:
To change to the parent directory, type "CD ..".
Many technical manuals use some other typographic convention for
clarity for command and data input, such as using a contrasting
color for such text. (The use of boldface or italics won't help
much, because it's hard to tell if a period is bold and
impossible if italic.) In such cases, the quote marks are
eliminated altogether, especially if the command language happens
to include use of quotes or apostrophes.
Of course, such considerations don't apply in the normal case of
quoting spoken language, because no one speaks punctuation marks,
anyway, except for the late Victor Borge.