Commas can sometimes be hard. This article touches on a particular set of use cases I see mangled all the time at work.
(h/t +Karen Conlin)
An article title, “An article title ‘An article title needs commas’ needs commas,” needs commas
A little while back, a fellow editor asked me about commas and appositives, particularly with an eye to mentioning titles of books and such like. Consider the following: A 2011 report, “Fun Things …
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Interesting, and makes good sense. But I think
A report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa,” came out in July.
is not quite right. I think this is better,
A report, “Fun Things to Do in Ottawa", came out in July.
An article title, “An article title ‘An article title needs commas’ needs commas”, needs commas.
+Chris Blackmore Sadly, that;s an area where I prefer how you do it over there to how we do it over here.
I put the comma before the closing quote because it is expected. That seems to be changing. It does seem silly. I haven't been able to find out why we do it that way.
+Scott Randel It's an American convention; the Brits do it the other way around., which seems a bit cleaner.
Yeah, but why did we adopt the convention? My google fu has shed no light on this question.
+Scott Randel Given linguistic precedent, it's just as likely that it's how the Brits did it in the 18th Century, and then they changed their minds in the 19th but we kept up the "old ways."
I used to know the names for the parts of speech when parsing a thing like that, but it was a while ago… I put the comma after the closing quote because the quotes delineate a thing, and the comma seems to be an external separator. Or something. My copy of "The King's English" is in storage, or I would look it up.
From http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/quotation.htm#footnote
There are peculiar typographical reasons why the period and comma go inside the quotation mark in the United States. The following explanation comes from the "Frequently Asked Questions" file of alt.english.usage [http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/alt-usage-english-faq/faq.html]: "In the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic." This seems to be an argument to return to something more logical, but there is little impetus to do so within the United States.
And a reference here to The King's English – http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/quotation-marks-with-periods-and-commas … pointing to the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=yDAuAAAAYAAJ&dq=The%20King's%20English%20Fowler&pg=PA282#v=onepage&q=%22question%20of%20some%20importance%22&f=false
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quotation_mark&oldid=299541669#Punctuation and http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150703/why-is-the-period-placed-inside-the-double-quote-at-the-end-of-a-sentence (which confirm that US usage is the older UK usage).
(And in doing that last paragraph, and this, I note the differences in to how we treat quotations and how we treat parenthetical comments.)
Well, I guess I got my explanation. Thanks!