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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

#181

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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.

Whenever I ask my English teacher wife about this sort of thing she reminds me that punctuation is rhetorical.

If it's important to the writer that what is quoted be identified as a sentence then I agree with you, and I'm going to start using that construction in my writing.

But when it comes to quoting words people say, is often good enough to just quote the words.

When you store a command in a string, to you include the trailing newline? I usually don't, but it'll always depend on the use case.

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

#183

Post by Y_Y »

sbuk wrote: post #121

Politics and the English Language [0] has this covered, though not directly referencing punctuation; "vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

If one is going to look to an authority in English, I think there's none better than Orwell. There are those of the opinion, however, that with regard to "outright barbary" the ship has long since sailed.

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

#184

Post by ctrlp »

This makes sense to me and looks good. Some other quote style ideas:

- use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote; use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy').

- use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-fingered air-quotes look ridiculous).

- use double quotes around single quotes when nesting quotes. Avoid nesting more than one level of quotes.

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

#185

Post by chromatin »

john-aj wrote: post #86
rozab wrote: post #61

I was typing out an explanation/justification to the effect that when speaking aloud, the punctuation at the end of the sentence is 'heard' in the last word, even if the word is quoted. We insert a pause before the start of the quote to indicate it was direct, but there isn't a way of indicating whether, say, a question mark belongs inside or outside the quotation. But then I sounded out some examples in my head and…

Also, aren't questions marked primarily by word order rather than intonation in English?

Re. Intonation: I actually distinctly remember my first grade teacher having us practice a rising tone at the end of a “question sentence”. (US, 1980)

Also I remember being taught quite rigidly the “A,Eric an” style of quotation-punctuation relationship, and I naturally rejected it from the beginning as illogical.

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

#186

Post by JasonFruit »

Veen wrote: post #25
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.

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,…

Did you really say, "I tend to agree with the author?"

See the problem there? The quoted sentence is not a question, but the outer sentence is; why, then, is the question mark inside the quotation marks? Double punctuation would solve that ambiguity, and would not be redundant.

Alternatively, and I'm not sure which is correct, if the question mark is outside the quotation marks, was the quote a complete sentence?

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

#188

Post by chromatin »

sbuk wrote: post #121

Politics and the English Language [0] has this covered, though not directly referencing punctuation; "vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Hear, hear. An under appreciated long-form essay that I refer colleagues to frequently.

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

#189

Post by lolinder »

shannifin wrote: post #83
donatj wrote: post #20

I got in a heated debate about this with a technical writing instructor. Namely, I was ending a question with a quote along the lines of > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all”? The instructor wanted me to put the question mark of the outer sentence within the quotation marks despite the quoted text not containing a question mark. > Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all?” I felt like…

Unlike periods and commas, putting question marks and exclamation marks inside the quotation when they are not part of the quote is against AP, APA, Chicago, and MLA style specifications... Granted, I don't know if technical writing typically adheres to some other style, but shoving a question mark inside a quote it isn't part of is definitely not typical of American styles in general.

Correct, but that just shows why the American style is so confusing. That we have to have an exception for more meaningful punctuation marks just serves to confuse, and emphasizes just how bad the default is.

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

#190

Post by afranchuk »

I was taught the American way (as I live in the US), but immediately rejected it (even at a young age) and did it the British way, though I had no idea that's what it was called. Besides the week or so when teachers were covering that in their syllabus, nobody ever complained or noted it at all :)
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