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Kevin McLauchlan and William Sherman commented on the "comma inside quoted-string-with-question-mark?" issue.
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Some of us who learned our punctuation rules back then also learned that the slavish devotion to "put all the punctuation marks inside the quotes" was not based on the writers' intentions or the meaning of the information at all: It was primarily a newspaper printers' convention that kept them from losing the very small type blocks that contained the punctuation marks at the ends of lines when setting type for new editions with tight deadlines. [The quote mark block was bigger than a period block.]The printers' unions had a lot to do with that convention being incorporated into the AP style rules in the US in the first place. I'm not sure why it spread to other areas, but I remember checking proof sheets for those kinds of punctuation problems in my first editing job.
Margaret Cekis, Johns Creek Ga
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