Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Logical punctuation: Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? – By Ben Yagoda – Slate Magazine – I’d say another factor here is the increased use of “quote items” in sentences, and the lack of clarity in the rules of how to deal with them, esp. when they contain question marks and exclamation points. That said, this is an area that I see a lot of the folks who work for me floundering — though it makes me wonder whether, instead, I should stop pushing for the interior punctuation.
- Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security, Complaint to FTC Alleges | Threat Level | Wired.com – Maybe it’s because I’m a long-time satisfied customer … or maybe because I’m in IT … but I don’t find this all that big of a deal.
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As an American, I say yay for logical (exterior) punctuation! Putting a period or comma inside a quote when it doesn’t belong there makes as much sense as putting it in between html tags when it doesn’t belong there, either.
Although from childhood I’ve known about the US inability to spell correctly*, it is only recently that I found out they can not punctuate either. When I queried this on whatever blog it was alerted me to the fact, I was snidely put down with “[Some American etquette ‘expert’ I’ve never heard of] states this is the correct way”. I’d never thought about any of this until then.
There is a fundemental difference between
Jack said “I have one?”
and
Jack said “I have one”?
In the former it is Jack querying whether he has it, the latter is querying whether Jack actually said it. (Obviously if both are queries then it should read
Did Jack say “I have one?”
to clarify)
If the punctuation is not originally part of the phase in the quotes, then it does not belong in the quotes. The quote marks show exactly what is being quoted
One thing I have spotted, and I hope you can explain is the use of the square brackets. I was taught these are used where the enclosed text is not strictly part of the quote, but is replacing or additional for purposes of clarity, such as when the name replaces the pronoun, or to show author addition for comment/clarity. Thus
“***Dave read Last Hussars post. He wished that he would not be so arrogant.” would find that if just the last sentance is quotes to be
“[***Dave] wished that [Last Hussar] would not be so arrogant.” – sometimes the [ ] follows the pronoun. “Color[sic] me surprised”, he said.
In US writing I see “[L]ast Hussar knew he was right,” (putting that comma there felt odd, because I should be puntuating this sentance, not the quote). I can’t work out why the first letter is in [ ]. Will you tell me why?
Incidentally I use the “Oxford comma”, and have argued with a former manager about this.
“9/11” (for the event) and “World Trade Center” are correct in the UK, because both are proper nouns – the US date is now used as a name; if you say “9/11” people know which 11/9 you are talking about. While I would write about the towers in the centre of NY, They were named the “Center” – the same way I would never call the composer “Joe Green”.
*Before we start a flame war, this phrasing is in response to some of the comments made on the article, some of which suggest the UK should change to the US system “Because we are better”. (Note full-stop position.)
My grammar is worse when I type, rather than write.
You are correct about the use of brackets when names are substituted for pronouns, although in your example, “***Dave” would not be bracketed. Brackets are used for [sic] as it is not part of the quote, but an editorial comment noting that an error (or possible error, I suppose, considering your example) was in the original quote. In your final example, the “L” would be in brackets if the case had been changed. This is often done when the initial capital of a sentence is changed to lower case for a quotation.
Are these strictly American conventions? That surprises me.
@Last: Avocet answers truly. You see this a lot in quotations. E.g., “That damned reprobate of lawyer lost my case but he is still a nice guy” turns into “[H]e is still a nice guy.” I dislike doing this, preferring a broader context, but sometimes the preceding clause or sentence fragment is a serious distraction or non sequitur (non prequitur?), and it’s more accurate to note the change in case than to simply say “He …”.
To your earlier comment, ultimately all of this boils down to a combination of self-appointed or mutually recognized authorities and cultural inertia. There is no Platonic ideal of orthography and punctuation and grammar, as much as it pains me to admit it. The best one can hope for is something that is primarily understandable and secondarily consistent. To turn grammar and spelling into some sort of jingoistic exercise is even worse.
Your examples with Jack demonstrate why going “all out”or “all in” is always going to be difficult. Again, I run into this a lot with quotations, expecially quotations that are themselves quoting other sources. There’s also a serious issue (as the article notes) with tech terms, where including a spurious period, question mark, or semi-colon at the end of something can cause the computer to misunderstand everything.
I would probably, for clarity, do exactly what you’ve done with the two Jack sentences.
I am a huge fan of the Oxford Comma. My boss calls me “Too Many Commas Man”.
(In that last sentence, I put the period after the quotes because I didn’t preface it with a comma. I’m not quoting my boss, but the term.)
(So why would we not put punctuation marks outside the parentheses)?
(So why would we not put punctuation marks outside the parentheses)?
We should put the punctuation marks where they logically belong. (If you want your complete sentence(s) to be parenthetical, then the punctuation should go inside the parentheses, too.)
Interestingly, the primary style guide for my thesis — the writing guide for a major journal — says to avoid parentheses wherever possible, yet in my field the correct way to cite a reference is to put it in parentheses, such as
Smith and Jones have determined that blah, blah, blah (2010).
or
Blah, blah, blah (Smith and Jones, 2010).
I would have put the question mark inside the bracket there – the phrase inside is a question – especially as it stood alone. The full stop goes outside if it finishes a sentence of which the bracketed words are part (logically, I think). Thus
Do you like Blue (the boy band, not the colour)?
The rule of brackets is (or at least was) you can take them, and the enclosed words out of a sentence, and it still makes sense: They add information, but are not essential to meaning.
The [] round initial letters is only something I’ve seen on the ‘net- I think by Columbines, though it isn’t easy to tell. Trying to remember what I was taught 25 years ago. I THINK (I can’t guarentee) that if you pick up the quote part way through you start with an ellipse, and thus the capitalisation is not needed.
“…because I didn’t preface it with a comma.”
You can also use them to omit parts of the quote that are not relevent, as long as you don’t alter the quote’s meaning.
If you read Jasper Fford’s “Thursday Next” series you will find an explanation of why certian parts of the world omit the ‘u’ (rationing).
I’ve seen the worst of both worlds, e.g., “… [B]ecause a sentence should always start with a capital letter, even if the beginning of it is elided.”
Now what confuses me these days is that sometime ellipses are used to omit material, and sometimes bracketed ellipses are used: “Peter Piper picked […] peppers.” It seems to be a way to show actual elision in the quotation, vs. the intentional use by the author of ellipses to show a pause. Doing a quick look-up, it appears that use is (or was) recommended by the MLA, discouraged by others. Like all things grammatical, it seems to engender a lot of debate.