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Comment by stilley2 | Hacker News Reader

Not spelling, but my wife (Canadian) and I (American) recently had an interesting discussion about the placement of a comma following a quoted portion of a sentence. Americans are commonly taught the comma /always/ goes before the closing quotation marks, whereas in British English it depends on the context. You know it's a good weekend discussion when the Chicago Manual of Style gets involved.

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I can't remember where I read this, but punctuation is placed before the closing quote because it looks nicer, and some of this might be because of typewriting and fixed-width fonts. Two spaces after a sentence is also a carryover from typewriters. Meanwhile, programming culture and its regular grammars is creeping into written language, and we're seeing punctuation follow quotes more often.

It's interested how technologies of the time affect grammar and language.

The opposite story I head was the the Chinese invented movable type before the West, but it's a lot less practical for languages without an alphabet.

This is suitably obscure. Do you mean inverted commas or a comma?

I think it's something along the lines of:

"Hacker News is," he said, "a website." (American)

vs.

"Hacker News is", he said, "a website". (British)

We Americans are taught to always put punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a few limited exceptions.

I gather our cousins across the sea are taught not to do this.

It's started to bleed into my own writing given the international nature of the teams I work with.

Yeah basically. I'm still not entirely clear what the British rules are.

Generally, whatever the rulers say.

Thanks that makes it clear yes I was taught outside (from Australia) and I didn't know there was an inside rule, I must look out for that in the novel I'm reading

I read long ago that the American convention comes from an old printing press limitation and flowed into writing too. This answer [1] on English StackExchange has some details. I’m sure many other sites have written about this in detail.

[1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150703/why-is-th...

Seems implausible to me. As one of the replies indicates, most periods at the end of lines won’t follow a quote, so this solution doesn’t work there.

Worse, it only applies to lines ending in a period. Those are extremely rare because hand-set lines typically ended with filler, in order to make all lines in a block of text equal length. See for example https://letterpresscommons.com/setting-type-by-hand/: “ As you are setting your line of type and finish the last word of the line, you’ll need to fill out the rest of your line with word spacing material”

I also would think most exclamation marks would not be wider than periods and commas. Why, then, are those typically rendered outside closing quotation marks?

https://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/alt-usage-english-faq.html says

“According to William F. Phillips (wfp@world.std.com), 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.”

I don’t see obvious objections to that explanation.

The inside comma never made sense to me. Plus if you consider the quotation marks, the commas themselves almost seem redundant.

as an american, i never liked the inside rule, although it does "look right" to me from being taught it all through school.

the comma is not part of the quote, so it shouldn't be inside, typographical systems be damned. i tend to put it outside, to the horror of (american) grammar snobs everywhere. i think programming is what got me to seriously reconsider the placement.

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