Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 23:39:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Quotation Marks Question
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

"Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu> wrote:

> & I believe our brethern on the other side of the pond put "full
> stops" = (e.g. . ! ?) outside the quotes.

Commas, too.  (And semicolons, but so do we.)

"ecf" <ecfield at comcast.net> wrote:

> There is a trend among techies especially, to do away with this form
> since it is really illogical.  Any programmer will tell you there is
> a nesting problem with any punctuation inside the quotes.  Unless,
> of course... it applies specifically and ONLY to the quoted object.

"Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net> wrote:

> Techies tend to assume that the entire world was invented within
> moments of their birth and still awaits their contribution to bring
> it to order.

I think what ecf meant was that placing punctuation within quote
marks, when the punctuation is not part of what's being quoted, can
lead to ambiguity when there are nested quotes.  It's anyone's guess
which level of quotation the punctuation marks belong to.  Yes, it's
generally possible to rephrase it in a way that removes the ambiguity,
but only if the writer notices the problem.

I've heard that Arabic has a much more severe form of this problem:
In that language, there are certain pairs of letters than are always
printed in a certain order whenever they are adjacent, even though
this often makes a word turn into a completely different word.  It's
as if English had a rule that whenever "tr" would appear, it should
be printed as "rt" instead.  And people just had to guess from context
whether this had been done, or whether "rt" was really meant.

A good summary of the standard American English rules for punctuation
and quotes can be found at
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/research/puncquotes.html

The biggest problem with quotes I see online is when someone
doesn't use quote marks at all, but resorts, perhaps unknowingly,
to using Microsoft "smart quotes" instead.  When viewed on various
non-Microsoft platforms, they are likely to look like anything or
like nothing.  To me, they generally show up as a backslash followed
by a three digit number.  223 or 224, if I recall correctly.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.