Re: Punctuation Inside Quotes

[mpriestley -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM]

Sally Marquigny writes:
>I'm really surprised that this is as much of an issue as I've found it to
>be.  I was always instructed to place the punctuation inside quotation marks
>or parentheses if it *belongs* with that text and outside if it belongs with
>the "big" text.  For example:
...
>It's always made sense to me as a rule of thumb & I've never heard of anyone
>having confusion over reading it.  What's everyone else doing?

Well, the way you're doing it is right, if you're British.  If you're American
then it's wrong.  Even though it makes perfect sense, it's still officially
wrong.

The Chicago Manual of Style has quite a bit to say on the subject: punctuation
goes inside quotes except for semicolons, outside parentheses, exceptions
for philosophical special terms in single quotes, blah blah blah....
(this is based on a brief skim, so don't trust me on the nitty details here)

The upshot is that, for American usage, logic has been arbitrarily sacrificed
on the altar of some vengeful New World god.

As to what other people are doing?  Well, we solve the issue by never using
quotation marks.  We use a separate font for text entered by the user,
or displayed on a computer screen, so that we don't need to use quotes.
That way this particular usage rule never affects us.

Michael Priestley
mpriestley -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com
Disclaimer: speaking on my own behalf, not IBM's.  Uh... I guess that was
the "royal" we above; or else I've got MPD...