{"id":711,"date":"2017-07-18T14:47:31","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T18:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/?p=711"},"modified":"2021-04-02T12:40:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T16:40:11","slug":"dont-quote-me-on-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/18\/dont-quote-me-on-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t quote me on that."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to say something controversial: I think the way North Americans use commas and periods within quotes is illogical. To me, it just looks wrong. If I had my choice in the matter, I would eschew it in favour of the British rules.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with a bit of history (which I have taken from a blog post<\/a> by Mignon Fogarty). Commas and periods apparently started being used inside quotation marks because of the way typesetting worked; without printing them in that way, the presses of the time would cause things to break. So, there was a practical reason for it. I assume technology quickly compensated\u2014but, by the time it did, the use of commas and periods had become a standard.<\/p>\n

In the early 20th century, Britain “broke” with this standard because (quite rightly, as I believe) it was illogical.<\/p>\n

Let me briefly recap the general rules. Punctuation marks go outside of quotation marks\u2014unless the punctuation is part of<\/em> what’s being quoted, and then they go inside the quotation marks. In North America, periods and commas are an exception\u2014they always go inside<\/em> the quotation marks.<\/p>\n

As I was growing up\u2014and for many decades after I stopped getting taller\u2014I used the British system (albeit with North American double quote characters). I didn’t realize until I was much older that this was wrong. I imagine it had something to do with my being Canadian and assuming I could just pick and choose from among the North American and British elements I liked best.<\/p>\n

North American (or “inside”) style:<\/p>\n

Commas go inside quotation marks around words like “one,” “two,” and “three,” as do periods after a final quoted word like “four.” I might also say, “So does all punctuation that’s part of actual dialog.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

British (or “inside\/outside”) style:<\/p>\n

Commas go outside quotation marks around words like ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘three’, as do periods after a final quoted word like ‘four’. However, I might also say, ‘Punctuation that’s part of actual dialogue stays inside the quotation marks.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Note also the difference in the style of the quotation marks, which I included, and that I deliberately used the US spelling of “dialog” in the North American example.)<\/p>\n

Although I can easily copyedit according to the North American standard, if I’m quoting a single word or phrase it always strikes me as wrong for it to have a comma or period inside the quotation marks because that word or phrase does not, itself, contain a comma or period.<\/p>\n

More than that, as the British Fowler brothers claimed, it’s simply not consistent that a couple of arbitrary punctuation marks should be treated differently from all the other punctuation marks\u2014especially when there is no justification for it.<\/p>\n

Ironically, although I never used to find the use of commas<\/em> inside quotation marks all that unusual, the more I’ve been thinking about my dislike of periods<\/em> inside quotation marks, the more I’ve been struck by the inconsistency\u2014and the more I now also dislike seeing commas treated this way.<\/p>\n

But part of being an editor is understanding what your audience is used to. And if you want to communicate effectively, it often doesn’t matter what you<\/em> prefer. It’s only when a choice can be reasonably made that your preference should be a variable in the outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to say something controversial: I think the way North Americans use commas and periods within quotes is illogical. To me, it just looks …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","archive-loop-container"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledandcomposed.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}