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Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

erichgrunewald.com

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Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#151

Post by hjek »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #117
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

It's not the only element of style that may seem illogical, there are many more. Off the top of my head: * Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and s…

> * Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and style guide used.

Any level of nested parenthesis is fine (is what I think at least (as someone who's written a bit of Lisp of Lisp (or Racket and Clojure specifically) (because you get kinda used to it (when in a way they just become invisible (or unnoticeable))))). But nested quotations is also an issue with backtick (`) when doing command substitution in the shell, and we have to resort to $() to fix it. There's not really a $()-like syntax for written English though.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#152

Post by maybeOneDay »

KronisLV wrote: post #93
maybeOneDay wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure. JSON?

Not quite, in practice you still occasionally stumble upon situations like these: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-proper... Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...

I see what you mean, but the first appears to be a PHP bug (unless I am misreading?).

The second, appears to be a tool for parsing a json blob which has been escaped and encoded as a simple string inside another json blob. That's certainly an interesting problem, and one that is likely to come up in a sufficiently complicated world - however it's not an issue with parsing JSON. It's an issue with parsing /any/ data structure or language that may contain strings and as such seems unavoidable.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#153

Post by aardvark179 »

I’m not aware of the punctuation mark going outside the quotation being, “British style,” and I’m struggling to find other references to it being so. It’s certainly not what is done in most British typography.

Putting the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks has been a thing ever since printing, and I always thought it was done to avoid have an isolated full stop on a printing plate, which could be damaged relatively easily., but this may be a retroactive justification.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#154

Post by kube-system »

smitty1e wrote: post #79
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

Punctuation has a braking effect on the reader. , ; : . If you're at a full stop, the second . feels superfluous.

Then again, ellipsis marks are also a thing.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#155

Post by currysausage »

bambax wrote: post #149
currysausage wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that em (current point size) and en (½ em) spaces are both wider than the regular space character (typically ¼ em). An espace fine insécable (narrow no-break space) is even smaller, usually as small as a Unicode thin space (⅕ or ⅙ em): https://jkorpela.fi/chars/spaces.html Word, in French mode, inserts regular no-break spaces where narrow no-break spaces would be appropriate. I find this style rather irritating,…

Ah, you're right, my translation of espace fine to En was incorrect, thanks for the correction. An intriguing problem in typography is the patterns that spaces can form between words on different lines (called rivers); in traditional typography it is checked for but I don't know of any rendering engine that would do that automatically (in a browser, or on an e-reader for example).

I believe that both TeX (Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm) and InDesign (paragraph composer – expired US Patent 6,510,441) do this, so there is at least one open-source implementation that could be used as a starting point. Unfortunately though, the awareness for good and bad typography seems to be so low that this is probably not a priority for browser and e-reader vendors. It would be wonderful to have this as part of WeasyPrint or something similar.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#156

Post by smeej »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67
Veen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A footnote in the article addresses this: "More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly." I tend to agree with the author. While it's logically consistent, it's typographically redundant. There's no need to end a sentence with a full stop, a quotation mark, another full stop,…

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

Supposing the sentence weren't complete on the first page but the quoted one were, is this what you would expect to see?

"...and also look ugly.",

In that case, the convention of placing just a comma inside the quotation marks if the quoted sentence were complete but the quoting sentence were not seems much cleaner.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#157

Post by MisterTea »

> In the American style, you almost always put periods and commas inside the quotation marks

American here. I never put periods in the quotes unless the text within the quotes is a full sentence. I also had no idea there was an American or British style regarding quotes.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#158

Post by fauigerzigerk »

afarviral wrote: post #135
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If a quote is incomplete and a meaningful part is omitted there are other typographical conventions to indicate that, like a double period .. for example Yes, but what I'm talking about is the reverse situation. How would you know whether or not the quoting (outer) sentence is complete? You cannot logically infer that from the quoted (inner) sentence, which is why I'm saying that the second period is not redudant.

you would assume its complete in the absence of a double period. For instance, he said "some random shit". The quote in the previous sentence is a complete one. But then he said " some other ..". An incomplete quote. I personally think we should include the full stop though as it conveys more information and is less cognitive overhead, "it's obviously not redundant.". Even considering that we tend to treat punctuatio…

>you would assume its complete in the absence of a double period

That is true for the inner sentence, but again, I'm talking about the outer sentence. It needs its own terminator to make it unambiguously clear that it is complete.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#159

Post by Veen »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #117
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.

It's not the only element of style that may seem illogical, there are many more. Off the top of my head: * Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and s…

In general writing, you have to be careful to balance repetition. At one extreme is what's been called "elegant variation"[0] and at the other is monotonous repetition, which hurts readability.

But, as you say, in technical writing, it's enormously irritating. I do a fair bit of freelance writing, and it pisses me off no end when editors and clients change a technical term for an apparent near synonym because they don't understand the nuance. It makes the sentence nonsensical and makes me look as though I don't know what I'm talking about.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#160

Post by CarVac »

runeks wrote: post #2

As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.

Someone I know made a font modified so that the quotation mark goes directly over the period, which is a better way to combine the two.
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