Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
erichgrunewald.com
erichgrunewald.com
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.
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus. I refute it thus”.
This looks "unbalanced" to me.
While we're on the topic, all the journals I'm familiar with require punctuation like full stops (aka periods) to be included in displaystyle maths expressions. There is a some logical justification for this, but it looks awful, and can be downright confusing depending on the sort of notation employed. It particularly irks me to see a spare comma tagged on to the end of a tensor calculus expression, that's supposed to be understood in the context of the surrounding prose, rather than the adjecant mathematical expression.
> 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 agree with you in principle, but aesthetics matter!
I don't care what other people think, this is the only thing that makes sense if you ask me.
Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me. I would suggest one of the following:
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.
You've chosen not to quote the full stop. There's no law that says you have to include everything in the quotation, right?
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.”
This also works if the quoted sentence ends with a question or exclamation mark.
It's a shame that punctuation of human languages can't be logical, but it seems that we're stuck with inconsistent requirements and messy compromises. Cases like the following really confuse and annoy me:
“On the other hand[,]”[,] she said, “we could wait till dark[.]”[.]
(Should that depend on whether the original spoken sentence would, if written, contain a comma after "hand"?)
Oh, if only languages worked so consistently.
DESCRIPTION_OF_WHAT_WAS_SAID: "$(DIRECT_QUOTE.)".
Has there ever been a case of anything nesting nicely, be it in languages, programming, or any other medium of writing? Maybe XML? I'm not sure.
JSON?
Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...
The second, appears to be a tool for parsing a json blob which has been escaped and encoded as a simple string inside another json blob. That's certainly an interesting problem, and one that is likely to come up in a sufficiently complicated world - however it's not an issue with parsing JSON. It's an issue with parsing /any/ data structure or language that may contain strings and as such seems unavoidable.
Except for a data format which would allow embedding data in a nested fashion without altering it in any way. For example:
some_object_field: "some value"
some_other_field:
with_sub_objects:
and_sub_fields: "with values"
and_also_fields:
"""
which_allow_objects:
embedded_as_strings: "without transforming the structure"
which_both: "JSON and XML"
have_somewhat: "failed to do"
#""" control sequences should also be valid in the body, as long as there is proper indentation, a la Python
# which could then be simply stripped for display, for example, based on the first """ having N indentation
# then it would follow that the rest of the data entries have N+TAB_WIDTH, which could be simply stripped
# also, processing the beginning of every line would be less expensive than iterating through the entire line in search of escaped \n or anything of the sort
"""
As a consequence, the amount of parsing and processing that you need to do is really bad for performance. Of course, there are formats like YAML and TOML that go in the opposite direction - they try to cover all use cases and end up being overcomplicated.
There are occasionally other attempts like JSON5 to improve things: https://json5.org/
However those also oftentimes are not very popular, because there is just too much ecosystem that has been built around the older formats, like XML, JSON and even YAML.
Reality seemed to involve eldritch abominations like one system I encountered that had entire Base64 encoded XML documents embedded as attribute values in a higher level document and then this approach applied recursively....
Edit: Of course, this wasn't XMLs fault - but for some reason a lot of XML used in the "enterprise" world seemed to be primarily designed to eat the soul of whoever gazed upon it.
s/the punctuation of //Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus?”!
AFAICS, the only way to render this faithfully is the way I just did. In other words, you really do need the punctuation both of the outer sentence and the inner sentence. By extension, the only logical approach for the original sentence would be:
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.”.
On a different note, might I use this moment to complain about American books not closing quotations, if they continue on onto a new paragraph, and then opening them again? I.e.:
John said: "I have two things to say.
"One of these things is this.
"The other thing is this."
John spoke to Paul. John said: "I have two things to say.
"One of the things is this."
"What's the other?"
"The other thing is this."
Even in the purest programming languages, we're happy to design special-case idioms that sacrifice perfect orthogonality for better human factors, provided there's an unambiguous parse. Scheme provides (define <identifier> <expression>) - utterly elementary. Yet defining functions by binding identifiers to anonymous lambdas is so annoying that an unneccesary and inconsistent second syntax is provided, (define (<identifier <args...>) <expression>).
Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"
John said: "I have two things to say."
"What are they?"
"One of these things is this.
"The other thing is this."
– how would you punctuate that? If you close each paragraph with a quote, then there's no way to tell who's speaking except to label each paragraph:
Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"
John said: "I have two things to say."
Bob asked: "What are they?"
John answered: "One of these things is this."
John continued: "The other thing is this."
And if you don't open each quoted paragraph with a quote, it's very hard to tell which paragraphs are quoted:
John said: "I have two things to say.
One of these things is this.
The other thing is this."
The third thing, he kept to himself.
"On the other hand", she said, "we could wait 'til dark".
Well, I don't really like that; it just doesn't look nice to me.
/\."\./, /\."/ /\.([^\w])\./, /\.$1/The single period favours both elegance and clarity over slavish and unimaginative punctiliousness.
I would argue clarity and elegance don't oppose one another; elegance means being as clear as possible without being clumsy or heavy handed, and without insulting your reader's intelligence. Said reader is not a machine, they're supposed to be fluent in the language.
We should reduce ambiguity as much as possible, but no more than that. Adding signs where no ambiguity remains only worsens the signal to noise ratio.
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, and then a space, before beginning the next sentence with a capital letter.
But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.
As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
simple-statement =
empty-statement
| assignment-statement
| procedure-statement
| goto-statement .
empty-statement = .
In practice the separator-vs-terminator distinction mostly shows up in if-statements:
if foo then
bar
else
baz;
Still I actually struggled each time this given not exactly sure I am in English or American camp.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...
Every effort to make a logically consistent "engineered" language has so far failed by any reasonable measure, notably, Esperanto. Others have tried and had even less success than Esperanto. For things to even change in language usage there really has to be a pain point or some kind of trauma or isolation. Mere aspiration for aesthetics or logical consistency isn't enough. How did the American English come to be anyway? A bunch of people got on boats and went to a remote wild continent and stayed there. Forever.
My newspaper will shorten "United States" to "U.S.", and not add an extra period at the end of a sentence. (Not sure if the spaces are different widths.) When the next word would naturally start with a capital letter it can be difficult to tell whether the sentence ends after the abbreviation, sometimes making for garden-path sentences.
>> There have been some rumblings inside the U.S. Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer said in an interview...
Though I am a programmer, so maybe it is just us...
Yes, but what I'm talking about is the reverse situation. How would you know whether or not the quoting (outer) sentence is complete? You cannot logically infer that from the quoted (inner) sentence, which is why I'm saying that the second period is not redudant.
That is true for the inner sentence, but again, I'm talking about the outer sentence. It needs its own terminator to make it unambiguously clear that it is complete.
, ; : .
If you're at a full stop, the second . feels superfluous.
E.g.: '«Are you joking?!», he said. The other replied, «I'm not joking at all». They went on'.
I'm just saying that the outer/quoting sentence needs its own punctuation regardless of what's going on in between those quotation marks.
"You are going" has a very different meaning from "You are going.", because the first implies there is something `you` are going to do. Whilst the second implies you are being ordered to leave.
I agree that maintaining punctuation of the quote is important for context. But outside of the quote, it practically never matters if there is a period or not after the quote. The reader may choose.
> He looks up, "This is it." Bob says, gazing at the sky.
* Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and style guide used.
* Repetitions: unless used as a stylistic device (in poetry, advertising, etc.), your editors will try to modify repeated words, trying to find synonyms. In technical writing, it is an abomination, and competent editors know very well they must not touch any specific terms, no matter how often repeated, as they have very precise meaning.
But in general, the rules present in style guides are meant to ensure consistency and uniform reading experience, so that the reader is not distracted by form and can concentrate on the meaning, so they are a good thing as long as people are aware these are just arbitrary rules separate from spelling and grammar.
Any level of nested parenthesis is fine (is what I think at least (as someone who's written a bit of Lisp of Lisp (or Racket and Clojure specifically) (because you get kinda used to it (when in a way they just become invisible (or unnoticeable))))). But nested quotations is also an issue with backtick (`) when doing command substitution in the shell, and we have to resort to $() to fix it. There's not really a $()-like syntax for written English though.
There sort of is, if you use "smart" quotes. “Hard to find on a phone keyboard though, and not that distinct.”
But, as you say, in technical writing, it's enormously irritating. I do a fair bit of freelance writing, and it pisses me off no end when editors and clients change a technical term for an apparent near synonym because they don't understand the nuance. It makes the sentence nonsensical and makes me look as though I don't know what I'm talking about.
Parentheticals in English sit in this sort of midpoint between a modifying clause for necessary elaboration and a footnote/end-note for optional detail, and lots of people including me use parentheses where "inlining" the parentheses or moving them to a footnote would be more appropriate. That's in addition to conventional uses of parentheses, like to expand abbreviations.
"...and also look ugly.",
In that case, the convention of placing just a comma inside the quotation marks if the quoted sentence were complete but the quoting sentence were not seems much cleaner.
He said "I came in with the tide.", but she wasn't listening.
He said "I came in with the tide.," but she wasn't listening.
However, I do personally think the full stop inside the quotes is redundant and would remove it, unless it made a real difference to the sentence meaning.
To that end, I am struggling to think of a time where the punctuation at the end of a quote really mattered. Even exclamations are less necessary, with the support of the surrounding sentance. Consider; they screamed "stop" to get the attention of everyone. And, "stop!" they screamed. In both, the change of voice to the quoted word is about the same.
The outside sentence can continue after the quote; the terminating period outside of the quote is necessary if the sentence is ending there.
We know that the quote has ended with the closing quote, and so we can agree on the convention that there is an implied period there, if the quoted material is a complete clause with subject and verb. If it needs some other punctuation like a question mark, then that is explicit.
> He asked me "what time is it?".
The ? ends the question, the . ends the sentence that contains the embedded question.
The enclosing sentence can continue:
> He asked me "what time is it?" but hurriedly walked away as I glanced at my watch.
Now you positively, definitely cannot remove the period after "watch". Why would you remove it if the words "but ... watch" are deleted?
This stuff is simply too important to leave in the hands of people who have never written a compiler.
I meant my point mostly tongue in cheek. Redundancy is not necessarily bad.
I do have trouble reading your sentence, though. The change of voice in a declarative sentence to interrogative without a stop, is kind of jarring. In that one, I'd leave off the quote and question mark, I think.
That all said, I think I mainly agree that it is all guidelines and mostly driven by reasons we no longer remember or care about. The rule I remember hearing was that the smaller character of the period was preferred inside the larger character, as the period was prone to break if done in the other way.
> He asked me what time it is, and ....
Now we have an embedded wh-clause, not an embedded quote. Embedded wh-clauses are not questions.
(One piece of evidence: subject and auxiliary are not inverted, appearing as it is rather than is it.)
It’s not futile to reconsider conventions, no matter that demands may go ignored.
Also, your preceding paragraph highlights another issue: what if the sentence being quoted has different punctuation than the sentence it's placed in? You wrote a sentence that should end in a question mark, but the quote should end with a period.
> Blah blah "Quoted sentence in entirety."
versus
> Blah blah "Quoted sentence fragment".
and he said: "Mary, let's go
--- page ---
fishing".
Can you construct a pair of sentences where the potential ambiguity would be meaningful and not trivially resolved with context?
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, “I refute it thus.”, as his foot rebounded.
Is the period redundant? Or the comma after it? None of them? This looks almost as ugly as two periods.
The structure of the whole looks incomplete and unbalanced without the second full-stop, which I find ugly. I guess that I care more about logical structure (or my idea of logical structure), than typographical utility.
See the problem there? The quoted sentence is not a question, but the outer sentence is; why, then, is the question mark inside the quotation marks? Double punctuation would solve that ambiguity, and would not be redundant.
Alternatively, and I'm not sure which is correct, if the question mark is outside the quotation marks, was the quote a complete sentence?
Did you ask, "Is this your dog?"?
How are you today?.
This is important!.
I want to call to your attention this very important!! point: always checks the return value of your system calls.
Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
> Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
Or would they have commas as is used when the : is degrades into the less definitive ;?
I used to love to write. That all ended in college, with English Instructors. I wasen't the only student either.
There was so much emphasis on grammar, interesting writers just seemed to sound all alike. I enjoyed some of the papers that were read aloud the first few weeks. By the end of the courses, the papers were technically correct, but boring, and lacked imagination. I could see the enthusiasm drain from the students faces with every paper covered in red Sharpie corrections.
I had one teacher that used to down grade me for not writing out numbers 1-10, and only using numbers for 11 on. I still don't know what's right, or care anymore.
(I believe S & W recommends writing out 1-10.)
Of course you can shorten your quote by one character and leave out the inner stop, and I'd say that was equally valid. I would tend to do that unless I want to make it absolutely clear that what I was quoting wasn't a run-on sentence that continued after that point.
It's always possible to make a full sentence quotation after a colon, possibly using indentation:
With just enough of learning to misquote.
— Lord Byron
“One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote.”
— Alexander Pope
“Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent and power.”
— AnonymousHaving to make the extra decision on whether the punctuation should be in, or outside the quote is too much to think about.
This looks completely bizarre to me. I hope this never becomes a standard.
If it's important to the writer that what is quoted be identified as a sentence then I agree with you, and I'm going to start using that construction in my writing.
But when it comes to quoting words people say, is often good enough to just quote the words.
When you store a command in a string, to you include the trailing newline? I usually don't, but it'll always depend on the use case.
It doesn't. The end quote with a period inside it ends the sentence.
> I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences
There aren't. English doesn't nest or overlap sentences. Ever. Therr are plenty of ways in which English combines multiple units which each could otherwise be their own sentences into more complex sentences, but none of them involve having something which remains a sentence inside a longer sentence.
I won't say it isn't so (that would be redundant), but this example makes my point again.
What a weird interpretation. Two characters shouldn't be needed to end a sentence, only a period can end a sentence. It'd be a lot easier to postulate the period inside ends the sentence and the quotation mark ends the quote that just ran outside the end of the sentence by one character.
.”. Feels like a visual stutter.
Either .” or “. are more final and visually stable.
I’d argue depending on whether the pause affected by the period is important to the quote itself, put it in the quote. Then again, a block-quotation is probably more suitable for that scenario. Personally, for basic quotes in prose I’d put the period on the outside of quote because that directs readers to pause after the quote ends, not before.
But .” is always syntactically wrong when then quoted text didn't have a full stop in it, and ”. is ambiguous about whether it's a complete sentence or not.
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.
I prefer to think it is what you are accustomed to, or habituated to.
From these comments a number of people including me, prefer to use the .”. form because we find that more aesthetically pleasing. I had discovered the .”. form myself because I play with my punctuation (and words and grammar), and until this discussion I hadn’t noticed others use .”.*.
I presume other other programmers play with syntax and punctuation too.
* Note I have italicised .”. and if you zoom on an iPad the full stops [US periods] change from squares to rhombusы.
Is "go there" a valid quotation of "never go there"?
But come on – should a punctuation style guide prevent misleading quotations? Can a punctuation style guide even do so?
> Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all”?
The instructor wanted me to put the question mark of the outer sentence within the quotation marks despite the quoted text not containing a question mark.
> Why did Jake believe the AI was “going to kill us all?”
I felt like doing so changed the meaning of the quote, and it felt like a misrepresentation. This being the “correct” way to do it has always irritated me.
I ended up rewording the sentence so it wouldn’t end with the quotation, and have just actively avoided ending sentences in quotes ever since.
Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder, but a quotation style that enforces incorrect quotations is not good.
> Question marks and exclamation points have their own rules.
> If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it
> The password is ’%>>~|]#^|,’ which is awesome.
Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
> The password, which is awesome, is:
> %>>~|]#^|
This also has the benefit of putting the password on it's own line, which should make life easier for people actually consuming the document.
In a slight adjustment of this example, what if the text were a question and the quotation were a statement. Would this be a good construct: Why did Jake believe "the AI was going to kill us all."?
Similarly you could have a text statement with a quoted question: Jake asked "would the AI kill us all?".
Why did Jake ask "Can I have another biscuit?"?
I was frightened when Jake shouted "Who are you?"!
My trousers were soiled when Jake shouted "Boo!"!
Why did I soil my trousers when Jake shouted "Boo!"?
I appreciate the skill involved in avoiding ambiguity. The hard part is knowing the unknown unknowns, ya know? I read both sentences the same way and can't really fathom why someone else wouldn't! (Of course, I don't have the context of the original quote here, so maybe that comes into play... but I don't know, and probably shouldn't have to!)
> Why did Jake believe the AI was "going to kill us all?"
This reads, to me, like Jake's quoted sentence was originally a question. If the original sentence was an assertion or a statement, then you're right this fundamentally changes the meaning and strength of Jake's sentence.
Æsthetic is misplaced pedantry, since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin.
Them's mighty strong words there.
> since the word comes from Greek through German, rather than Latin.
That's not a rule. Remember, this is language. It does seems like a dated spelling though, similar to "coöperate". It shows up in 19th century publishing.
Also, by this and the author’s argument, shouldn’t there actually be two periods? One inside the quote and one outside? (The author does address this, to their credit.).
Here's something that might clinch it for you:
Does this "look better on the page"?
Does this "look better on the page?"
The former must be correct, since the quote was not a question, and turning it into one would not be a fair quotation. Why should its status as a question change where we put the end of sentence marker?
The same argument applies to the period, since the quoted phrase may not have included one.
He asked her, “do you prefer the American style?”
It's not a "used to" thing. The British style introduces white space gaps that don't look good. It's like ending a sentence with a space .
> The former must be correct
IMHO, "correctness" in the sense of "here's exact the character string that occurred in that other document, and anything else is wrong," is kind of a programmer POV. A looser sense of correctness is perfectly fine.
Sure they do, to me. The comma you inserted between the end of the quote and the closing quotation mark looks bad to me, because I have a strong expectation of the opposite. That esthetic feeling you have is how 'used to' manifests.
Also the US spelling of 'esthetic' is ugly to those expecting 'aesthetic'. I'm sure the British spelling looks pretentious to Americans.
Based on this, I think it doesn't really matter, either in aesthetics or clarity.
So, often unaware?
As an aside, being an old C/C++ developer I still remember being taken aback upon hearing someone pronounce #define has "hash define." (But I use the American style for declarative sentences!) I've always heard it pronounced "pound define" going back for decades.
Language, it's fun!
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...
That said, perhaps there's something to be found in other languages. Some quote with «quote», some with “quote”, others with „quote“, and there's many other variations. I can see how ligatures can work with constructions such as ¿question? can have the quotation makes placed closer in the beginning of the question marks, especially with the slow change from the angled brackets to the English quotation marks in some Spanish speaking countries.
There are various conventions you can adopt around quoted punctuation
You, as an individual writer of English prose, have the option of adopting a style you prefer
It’s okay for reasonable people to disagree about that
All graphemes for the characters, too.
I know the "rules", but I've been also intentionally writing it in what I refer to as "functional style", e.g.:
""" Greg's reaction was "But what of the otters?!". Mary's "Nobody cares about otters!" was received with a stunned shock. Joseph calmly said "I'm ambivalent.". But Ophelia just "didn't care".
After hearing about the whole ordeal, Mary's brother was livid: "«Nobody cares about otters!»?! She's a bloody otterologist!"... and then he visibly shook, and his face blanked as he slowly collapsed into his armchair, looking broken, repeatingly mumbling to himself "Illogical... illogical...".
"""
First three are verbatim restated statements; fourth is a partial and/or summary statement (no quoted punctuation); fifth is a very complex example (and a long [but fully functional!] sentence.
We also need light-, mid-, heavy-strength commas. :p
Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple Issues Emergency Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw".
edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content generated online has a looser pattern than the articles generated for this morning's paper.
> 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)
This is the guide I follow, and it would only capitalize preposition five characters or longer:
The UK practise is for initialisms to be capiitalised and acronyms, which are prounced rather than spelled out, to have an initial capital (when rerfering to a proper noun) but lower-cased following.
So "Nasa", but "FBI".
There's some adoption of this in US English, though typically for words which have fallen into normal use and don't identify specific organisations or entities: scuba, radar, sonar, laser.
The UK style isn't uniform in all cases, particularly where initialism are pronouced with a mix of spelled-out letters and pronounced terms. So "HIV", but "Aids" (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/through-posi...). I believe much US military usage falls under this pattern, as with USAMRID or USCENTCOM. In the latter case, The Guardian chooses the entirely consistent ... "USCentcom".
The same source gives us "GBU-43/B or Moab, known as the 'mother of all bombs'". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/15/us-mother-of-a...
</pedant>
But then I sounded out some examples in my head and realised it would be totally obvious. The inflection of the question is apparent from the beginning of the fragment (¿), not just from the inflection on the last word. I knew this already, of course, but I didn't really grok it, I guess because of the limitations of how we write out punctuation in English.
The intonation that people think of as characterizing questions is actually specific to yes/no questions. It can be the only feature that marks the sentence as interrogative: "You know him?" is a valid sentence, and it is distinct from the indicative "You know him."
There are also what I think of as "question word" questions, and you might think of as "fill in the blank" questions: "Why are you here?"
These do not necessarily have the intonation that applies to yes/no questions. Like yes/no questions, they are characterized by subject-auxiliary inversion (the word order constraint you mention), and also like yes/no questions, that inversion is not guaranteed to be present in a question of this type: "Who sent you?"
(Note that inversion is possible for "You know him?" ("Do you know him?") and impossible for "Who sent you?"; these are different phenomena.)
I would argue that the yes/no question is primarily marked by intonation and the question-word question is primarily marked by the presence of a question word. Word order is affected in both cases, but not the primary indicator of what's going on. (Compare "He said what to the king?" - again, inversion is possible here ("What did he say to the king?"), but not required. In this case, the inverted version of the question is unmarked (normal), and the uninverted version suggests that the speaker wishes to place a special emphasis on something.)
Also I remember being taught quite rigidly the “A,Eric an” style of quotation-punctuation relationship, and I naturally rejected it from the beginning as illogical.
The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Also very irritating.
Precision: a non-breaking space (unicode U+00A0) :)
LibreOffice or other word processing software automatically replace normal spaces by non-breaking spaces in that case.
But in text editors (like vim), we must do it manually (Ctrl+Shift+ua0 on Linux), typically when writing a French text in markdown, it's a bit irritating indeed.
(KDE has a dialog for customizing this under Settings→Input Devices→Keyboard→Advanced, where there are an impressive 16 possible options. It is just options to setxkbmap underneath.)
Here in a book of classics printed in 1910:
https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics40elio/page/76/mo...
And in David Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753):
https://archive.org/details/essaysandtreati00humegoog/page/n...
The En Space is non-breakable, but the normal non-breakable space is Em in length, and therefore improper.
However, LibreOffice inserts a non-breaking space U+00A0 instead :(
Reminds me of https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekat%C3%B6r
Word, in French mode, inserts regular no-break spaces where narrow no-break spaces would be appropriate. I find this style rather irritating, but then again, I don’t read nearly enough French to get accustomed to it.
However, I do agree strongly with the late Jan Tschichold, who recommended thin spaces before question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons for other languages, too: https://www.courses.psu.edu/art/art101_jxm22/tschichold.html...
An intriguing problem in typography is the patterns that spaces can form between words on different lines (called rivers); in traditional typography it is checked for but I don't know of any rendering engine that would do that automatically (in a browser, or on an e-reader for example).
Also German has its own verbs for "for the insertion of inappropriate spaces before a punctuation mark." and "for the insertion of inappropriate spaces after a punctuation mark."[1] which are often used in a derogatory manner in connection with people who do it wrongly.
That's the typical answer a programmer would give. A linguist, or really any kind of sociologist, would rather say:
> There is no reason that there should be a single approach to punctuation in the English language.
For example, "this is how a neutral sentence should look like", I would say. I don't think "they saw a vase." looks good even in the middle of a sentence. However, "do I have a question?", or "I am exclaiming something!" do need their punctuation to make sense. Now, it's more ugly when you finish a neutral sentence a quote like "I am surprised!".
Of course, there will be cases, especially in literature, where the . will actually add something to the emphasis of a quote. For example, "I have said it all." could be used to emphasize the period itself - but in those cases, jarring punctuation like `.".` or `.",` would actually help to emphasize the importance of the period.
Even there, doing it like you did and putting the quoted sentence in the middle, not at the end, of the outer one looks about a gazillion times better
Going off on a tangent, here's a random example...
The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different.
In the US:
() = parentheses
[] = brackets
{} = braces (or curly braces)
<> = angle brackets
In the UK:
() = brackets (or 'round brackets')
[] = square brackets
{} = curly brackets
<> = angle brackets (or angled brackets)
I prefer the UK version because it is simpler and feels logical. Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
I'm not sure why the British one feels more logical to you, but I don't feel strongly drawn to either so probably it's more about familiarity.
> Plus, the word 'parentheses' is a mouthful :-)
There's a certain flow to the term "parenthetical" that I enjoy too! Alas I am entirely too parenthetic in my own writing and thus spend an annoying amount of time eliding the parentheticals :)
American here. I never put periods in the quotes unless the text within the quotes is a full sentence. I also had no idea there was an American or British style regarding quotes.
IMHO this is right up there with tabs vs spaces. People are going to have very different takes on what looks aesthetically pleasing based on viewing repetition and training. There is no right answer, since both are widely accepted, only personal preference.
I prefer the "British" style, FWIW. Maybe it's just what I was taught, but I have encountered arguments for the other way periodically (causing me to have to check), and I always preferred the way I learned for the reasons in the article.
It's pretty clear to me that the correct method (on the grounds of respecting source material) is: "punctuation inside, if it comes from the source, punctuation outside if it's from the outside context".
And there are times when quotes aren't even direct quotes, they could be scare quotes. Why the hell would you ever put punctuation inside of a scare quote? I don't think any american would do this.
E.g.:
Dough is pronounced like "doe." -- TERRIBLE. Stab my eyes out.
Dough is pronounced like "doe". -- sensible.
Why not? We have different vocabulary, different spelling. Our accents are sufficiently different that non-native speakers can't always understand both.
So serious question - why wouldn't punctuation also differ?
If you want to go that route, there's no reason for there to be more than one language on Earth.
Any attempt to research linguistics should respect the fact that people want to be different from each other, and see that as a valid reason.
Anyway, here is the code: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-lint/pull/101/files
What?
It does save space, but I'd say that's neither here nor there. It isn't like space for an extra period at the end of a sentence was ever at a premium.
At best, for a whole 200+ page book, you'd save a page or so.
similarly, the comma can be inherited by the formulation and implied (there is no sacrifice in '«That's too bad», John said, «but you can recover»' for '«That's too bad, but you can recover»' - the break is in the formulation and the explicit comma is redundant).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Why would you make a style choice to make something less aesthetically pleasing?
Absorption of set theory should make one cringe at 'Abc def. Ghi jkl. Mnop "qrs." Tuv...'. The quotation marks are logically included in the section beginning with 'M', then visually escape it.
...It is as if one wrote,
[Abc def] [Ghi jkl] [Mnop (qrs]) [Tuv...
I do use the British style when I can get away with it, but for anything formal or important I just suck it up and do it the way it’s supposed to be done.
Anyway, if I could change rules of English, this wouldn’t be that high a priority.
⸘Why has not yet the opening interrobang received similarly wide adoption‽
(Just don't use "??!" because that's a trigraph for "|".)
Are you just going to stand there and lie through your teeth?!
Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?
Another pain is when I see such code snippets on the web.
For the clarity, it's not only the US quotes I have a problem with. Other languages have also their corks:
- PL: „quote”
- PL: ‚quote’ (single variant)
- PL: ‘quote’ (british variant)
- FR: «quote»
- DE: »quote«
FR : « quote »
And all of the spaces except for the one after the ":" should be non-breaking spaces.
(Edited after correction from user bloak below)
I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark.
See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...
I thought you made another mistake here, but it turns out it's just my font that is broken. For anyone else who might have this problem: The closing marks are supposed to go from bottom left to top right, whereas they are displayed going from top left to bottom right :(
If I'm writing French then I will use «quote», I don't mix things between languages.
Also, French conventions like putting the dollar sign after the amount (123$), or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.
I'm a native English speaker, French is my second language.
https://culture.pl/en/article/pen-to-paper-mastering-the-qui...
- use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote; use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy').
- use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-fingered air-quotes look ridiculous).
- use double quotes around single quotes when nesting quotes. Avoid nesting more than one level of quotes.
"[...] the first game was better, but not in a good way"
There's no need to use the full stop inside the quote to show that the sentence had ended. That can be the default, because most time it doesn't matter, but in the cases where it is relevant to show that there's content after, then why not:
"I thought the first game was better [...]"
I'll also put in my two cents here about spaces after a period. I always use two spaces after a sentence and one after an abbreviation.
If you only ever use one, there is too much ambiguity around sentences that end with an abbreviation.
Also, I think I will be adopting the double spacing after a sentence.
But regardless, the styles have come to be known as 'American' and 'British' because they generally are preferred in American and British English respectively, even if it's not absolute: Americans tend to be taught US style, and Brits tend to be taught British style.
idiosyncratic deviance from established cultural norms looks adolescent in anything other than a private subculture.
Specifically in American English, which unlike French French or German German, does not have a state-sanctioned standards body attempting (and often failing) to police or mandate its evolution.
Earnest advice for those tempted to adopt "logical" style in American English language written communication: adhere to the standards.
Relevant: https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/Ruzvelt%20...
I’ve just always been unsure.
Now I’ve learned through this discussion that there is no definitive way, I feel freer to play it by ear and write what feels right at the time.
edit: for the record, I wrote the article and also posted it here. so I figured I could take the liberty of changing the title when sharing here.
Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English" is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and England for the UK), as those were the British they most commonly met.
Doesn't matter, language follows use, not etymology or geography. If a term has been established as something (in actual use) then it will be used, doesn't matter if it's not technically correct (same way "Indians" was used for centuries for Native Americans, and only fell out of use because of political concerns, not because it was also obviously incorrect and based on a misunderstanding of a whole continent).
In other words, as with all things, prefer unambiguous forms but consider and respect your audience.
He said, "Will you?" I said, "No!"
He said, "Will you"? I said, "No"!
He said, "Will you?". I said, "No!".
He said, "Will you?"!? I said, "No!" ;)
Putting the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks has been a thing ever since printing, and I always thought it was done to avoid have an isolated full stop on a printing plate, which could be damaged relatively easily., but this may be a retroactive justification.
After so many instances of the exact same typo in the book, I thought the author/editor had a specific problem with ordering quotation marks and dots.
It's only when I read another English book with the same "syntax error" that I realized that it was not a bug in English.
This is very emotional because we start when being 6 and as such, for many years, you are exposed to only one way to quote or put spaces around punctuation.
I am French, living in Germany and working in English 50% of the time. It is interesting that it is only after maybe 15 years outside of France that now my feeling for what is the right way in one language matches the rules. For example:
- How do you do?
- Comment allez-vous ?
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[1] and
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”[3]
Second one should be:
Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.[3]
This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do that!"
This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"!
This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!
While some marks provide emphasis, most (other than suggesting connectivity) denote a length of pause.
Punctuation (or lack thereof) that pulls you out of the flow of the reading is, IMHO, really not in the spirit of things ;)
“this.”
“this”.
‘this’.
The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or last.
The American/British dividing line is extremely hazy, and only really cements the typesetter's quotations in the minds of Americans.
How did this make it to the front page of HN?
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.” and then said no more.
(UK) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, ‘I refute it thus’, and then said no more.
or:
(US) Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus,” and then said no more.
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”
And of course the "Greek" part of the Empire survived for a thousand years after the Western part petered out.
As you illustrate by saying "less rules" instead of "fewer rules." (I agree with you: For any language, the less that non-native speakers have to worry about tripping over some finicky rule, the better.)
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus”.
This is one big sentence which contains an embedded quote. The period ends that big sentence.
The quote contains a complete sentence. Therefore, arguably, it deserves its own period.
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”.
So this matter revolves around the idea that we want only one period, and so the question is which of these two periods do we elide.
I'm arguing that if we are going to elide, the one we should elide is the inner one, because it's of less importance. Eliding the outer one leaves the entire sentence unterminated, whereas the quote is obviously terminated by the closing quote.
(What is the sentence period for? It's for indicating where sentences end, so that the reader doesn't get confused parsing the end of one sentence together with the start of the next one. A closing quote has a solid end indicator already.)
If there are multiple quoted sentences, then those except the last preserve their terminating punctuator:
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it? Ah, I refute it thus”.
What if the quoted sentence ends in a terminator different from the one of the embedding clause? Then we cannot elide either one:
> Dr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “How shall I refute it?”.
Except if the inner one is a period. We can establish the convention that a missing punctuator inside a quote is an implied period (if the quote is obviously a complete clause):
> Did Dr. Johnson really say “I refute it thus”?
Something like that. We should strive, in some halfway rational way, not to leave the overall sentence without terminating punctuation.
(I do not agree that .". has a redundant period. Two different sentences are ending, using their own punctuation marks which are not related, and could potentially be different. I agree that it's ugly. Eliding the inner period is not the same as eliminating it; we are making it implied. Something implied is still semantically there, just not as a visible syntactic token.)
Note that whatever." does not indicate the end of a sentence; it can plausibly continue:
> Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus." and kicked the rock.
As soon as we have additional words after the quote, we have two periods unless we elide one. In this case, we definitely must not elide the one after "rock". Whereas eliding the quoted one according to the hackerly style leaves a clean result:
> Dr. Johnson said "I refute it thus" and kicked the rock.
None of this has been relevant for many decades, and people have forgotten the reason for this rule. It was never correct to do, it was a choice to do it the wrong way around out of convenience.
If you're writing for an American audience, use American style. If you're writing for a British audience, use British style. If you're writing a journal article, or for a business, use whatever style everyone else there uses. If you're writing for yourself, use what you like.
Community guidelines[0]:
- When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
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Insinuating that anyone who wishes to discuss this topic isn't a "grownup" seemingly violates two maybe three guidelines. Your comment without the first sentence would have been more constructive.