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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

#261

Post by Spivak »

jeroenhd wrote: post #100
po wrote: post #18

The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...

Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.

What ligature would you propose for "? or "!

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

#263

Post by gumby »

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,…

For simplicity, every sentence should end with a full stop (period). Thus:

    How are you today?.

    This is important!.
Which clearly demonstrates that ! and ? can appear in the middle of a sentence, just as ; and , can:

   I want to call to your attention this very important!! point: always checks the return value of your system calls.
I do draw the line at introducing scoping operators though it would simplify the grammar.

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

#264

Post by Spivak »

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?

Sentences of the form ? with rising intonation are common and mean roughly , right? or , yes? There's no marker other than the intonation when spoken or the question mark when written to indicate that it's a question.

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

#266

Post by CRConrad »

fortran77 wrote: post #202

No. I will use a Nations’s preferred punctuation. To do otherwise is rude and inconsiderate.

So, which nation ("Nations’s"?!?) did you write that for? Do you know where I -- and all the rest of us who saw it -- are sitting as we read it?

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

#267

Post by lostgame »

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.

This rubs me wrong in all the ways and is aesthetically jarring as all hell to me.

If I’m reading a book or essay and I come across this type of punctuation, it actually actively removes me from my flow of reading and causes me to stop for a moment and lose immersion - same with obvious spelling and grammatical errors.

It’s amazing how dependent our reading immersion is on proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.

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

#269

Post by Spivak »

BostonFern wrote: post #220
JohnWhigham wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.

It's called title case, and it's not determined by the length of a word but by whether or not a word is minor. The rules defining minor words vary slightly between styles, but they're usually prepositions and articles.

You and APA seem to disagree on this https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitaliza... but it's ultimately one of semantics since if your list of minor words are all three letters or less then it's the same.

> Lowercase only minor words that are three letters or fewer in a title or heading (except the first word in a title or subtitle or the first word after a colon, em dash, or end punctuation in a heading)

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

#270

Post by Y_Y »

rplst8 wrote: post #249
willhinsa wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

If I could roughly generalize the sentiment: Are you just going to stand there and lie through your teeth?! Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?

Are you just going to stand there and tell me this isn't the most amazing sunset you've ever seen‽
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